A Philosophical Happy Hour on the ways in which passion may capture and distort our exercise of reason—or, in proper subordination, affect a coherence of our persons Thinking clearly.  It seems a vanishingly rare virtue.  Ours is a reactionary time.  Reaction, however, seldom comes from the clear light of reason—but rather from the murky vapors […]

Though a single language, Latin finds diverse expression across the centuries of its use. The student familiar with Cicero and Seneca will different modes of expression in Abelard and Aquinas. But Scholastic Latin, albeit less rhetorically fluid than many of the great classical authors, has a beauty all its own—a spiritual depth and a philosophical […]

New! The second, greatly expanded edition—for those who seek not mere correctness, but understanding. In a world that ignores education in grammar—first, reducing it to mere “correctness” and, second, outsourcing the verification of that correctness to digital technologies—Linguistic Signification offers something far more substantial: an integrated education in the principles of language itself. This text […]

Last year, the Lyceum Institute hosted Dr. Daniel De Haan (Frederick Copleston Senior Research Fellow & Lecturer in Philosophy & Theology in the Catholic Tradition Blackfriars and Campion Hall / Research Fellow, Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford) for a colloquium presentation on “The Centrality of […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the nature, operations, and training of the memory. “This invention [of writing]”, says the Egyptian King Thamus, in Plato’s Phaedrus, “will produce forgetfulness in the souls who have learned it.”  It perhaps shocks us, slightly at least, to read this condemnation of writing.  But let us consider the rest of […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour concerning the problem of universal education: should we educate everyone?  To what extent?  How?  Why (not)? If we look today at the results of universal education, particularly over the past century, we may think that its institution was a mistake.  The results are those of decline.  High test scores in a […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the struggle against nihilism—cosmological and psychological—and inadequate methods to assure ourselves of meaning in the cosmos. What is meaning?  What do we mean when we say the word?  What does the word signify?  It is one of those funny words that everyone seemingly believes himself to know and yet which […]

When we think of a Gothic cathedral, we tend to think upward: the spires of Cologne, the ascendant arches of Reims or Amiens; or the upward-soaring buttresses of Notre Dame de Paris; or the way one’s eyes are drawn along the high vault of a nave to the transepts or chancel. Perhaps we think of […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour continuing our investigation into economics, politics, Catholic Social teaching, and the restoration of the good life for humanity. Last week, our Philosophical Happy Hour asked what Rerum Novarum, the 1891 Encyclical promulgated by Pope Leo XIII—and chief inspiration for the newly-elected Pope Leo XIV’s choice of name—could tell us about the […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour investigating the Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, highlighting key passages and inquiring into their relevance today for considering the future of human society. Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, Pope Leo XII begins his famed Encyclical of 1891, “The desire of new things once having been aroused”, passes beyond the […]