Lyceum Institute Faculty Fellow John Boyer gave a lecture for the Thomistic Institute on 18 July 2024 of this year concerning the “Ontological Status of Light and Color in St. Thomas Aquinas”. Prof. Boyer’s discussion focuses on the role of light in the operations of vision. While many might discard the physical theories of antiquity […]

St. Thomas Aquinas presents in the corpus of his work (at, e.g., De veritate q.1, a.1, Summa Theologiae Ia-IIae, q.94, a.2, and In Metaphysicorum, lib.4, lec.3, n.605) the claim that what the intellect first conceives is being and that the intellect further resolves all conceptions into being. Illud autem quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum, […]

Our friends at the American Maritain Association have recently launched a podcast series, “Maritain Musings”, in which Lyceum Faculty Fellow Dr. Matthew K. Minerd is joined by guests to discuss different works of Jacques Maritain. For the fourth episode, the Lyceum’s Executive Director, Dr. Brian Kemple, joined Matthew to discuss Maritain’s essay, “Sign and Symbol”. […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the reasons for and nature of trust, distrust, and the consequences of breaking it. Image: Christopher Plummer as Iago and James Earl Jones as Othello (Requiescant in Pace). Trust today seems a quality lacking and, yet for which there is great desire.  We do not trust our politicians and often […]

Description Details All Lyceum Institute seminars include weekly readings, lectures, and live discussion sessions. The discussion sessions are recorded. This seminar includes focused readings of Maritain’s work. Participants are required to purchase Maritain’s Degrees of Knowledge and Untrammeled Approaches. Priced from $60 per person. Discussion sessions occur on Saturdays at 10:00am–11:00am ET (see world times […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the distinctions between falsehood, lies, and deception, and the morality of their use “Is lying always wrong?  Is lying always lying?” There are two ways, I believe, that we can approach this question.  The first evaluates manuals of moral theology or commentaries on ethics, looking for foundational reasons why for […]

A Philosophical Happy Hour on the role of paradox in carrying out investigations of nature, humanity, and being. “A paradox”, writes the Thomist philosopher Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, “is the tension existing between two apparently opposed propositions which cross one another and thus find themselves at peace.”[1]  Wilhelmsen contrasts the paradoxical with the dialectical—understood in the […]

The following is excerpted from a presentation given by John Deely on 1 March 2014 at the 37th Annual Meeting of the American Maritain Association. What Makes Possible both Lying and Truth as Human Accomplishments Comment “Listening to Maritain on the subject of sign as treated by Poinsot…” We should, in fact, listen to John […]

Our Colloquium series for the year 2024 continues with a thoughtful interpretation of a perennial difficulty in interpreting Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, presented by Joseph M. Cherny, PhD Candidate at the Center for Thomistic Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. Mr. Cherny asks: how is happiness self-sufficient? Does it find fulfillment in […]

Announcing the Lyceum Institute‘s plan for building its future and the future model of education. Dear friends, supporters of the Lyceum, and believers in the importance of genuine human education: I am thrilled, though not without a little trepidation, to announce the next major step in the development of the Lyceum Institute: the establishment of […]