A Philosophical Happy Hour focused on the question of friendship: its nature, deepening, and the necessity of others with whom we share the search for the good. I have spent much of my life alone.  The youngest in my family, I began homeschooling in fourth grade, and continued until I started community college, before transitioning […]

A Preface to a Long Conversation—on the relationship between faith and reason—begun by addressing the presuppositions which have made the conversation unnecessarily difficult. “There are not one hundred people in the United States”, once said Fulton Sheen, “who hate the Catholic Church; but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the principles and aims of language through univocal and analogical predication. What is the meaning or the significance of a word?  This question may operate on two levels: first, concerning a specific word’s meaning—“tree” or “justice”, “fruit” or “truth”; or, second, concerning the relationship between meaning in general and words […]

Description Our guiding questions: Is the act of faith or belief in revelation distinct in kind from the operations of reason?  Can reason prove faith?  Can reason disprove faith?  Can reason show faith as compatible with reason? | How is the faith to be made known?  Sacred texts, whether the Bible, Qur’an, or Torah, have […]

Description To understand and affect this maturation into postmodernity, we will turn our attention in this seminar to the major contributions to semiotics given by Deely: the proto-semiotic history, an expanded doctrine of causality,  the retrieved and clarified notion of relation, the concept of physiosemiosis, the continuity of culture and nature, the notion of purely objective reality, and the real interdisciplinarity which semiotics fosters. This is […]

Technology is often discussed and conceived in extreme terms: triumphant progress, mastering nature; or self-inflicted catastrophic destruction. But rarely is the question asked—and even more rarely answered well—what is technology? How are we affected in ourselves by our technologies? The 2024 Difficulties of Technology seminar, conducted within the multiyear Humanitas Technica project, asked these and […]

On 29 January 2026, I (Brian Kemple) gave the annual Aquinas Lecture at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This lecture, including Q&A, was recorded and is now available online. Watch on YouTube.

A Philosophical Happy Hour asking why (or whether) we should read some thinkers over others, explore some ideas before the rest, and take some philosophers more seriously than others. A question surfaces again and again in philosophical discussion, sometimes with impatience: why do certain thinkers keep returning? Why are Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, […]