What is dogma? Frequently, in modernity one will hear people mocking the idea of dogma: seen as some arbitrary rule that detains free intellectual pursuit. Dogma is also often seen as something exclusively religious—but this seems dubious. From my understanding a dogma properly speaking is something that usually comes after deliberation of some sort, as a […]

Why do we call a thing “good”?  We have been calling things good since childhood, but, as with any conception so fundamental, it is challenging to unfold its meaning.  Given the multifarious use of this name, “good”, is there even a unity of meaning to discover?  Is it just that we call anything good merely […]

We have completed our 2024 catalog and preliminary schedule for all seminars and courses!  While these are, of course, always subject to change (life being ever-unpredictable), I am happy to announce this very exciting slate of philosophy seminars for the upcoming year: Seminar Catalog 2024 Winter (Q1) Introduction to Philosophical Thinking – Brian Kemple Phenomenology: […]

We hear the word “philosophy” used often—often in cringe-inducing ways (“My philosophy on this is…” “That’s an interesting philosophy…” “His coaching philosophy…”), where the speaker really means an opinion or a method.  For others of us, it might conjure up images of books or a college course catalog; perhaps something having to do with symbolic […]

Perhaps this is an odd title—Living through the Barbarism—but it seems that ours is an age of unthinking strife. As a Lyceum Member asks: What is work and what is its purpose? This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently but also as a follow up to our conversation on Private Property […]

A Lyceum Member proposes, as a topic for our 29 November 2023 Happy Hour: “How much does the artist’s intention factor into the meaning of his art? How can semiotic Thomism help us to answer this question? Can there be a more fitting interpretation of the art he makes than the one he intended? Is […]

In his work Introduction to Moral Theology, Fr. Romanus Cessario O.P. remarked on certain misconceptions with respect to how the natural had grown in application and importance over time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: arguing that the presentation of the natural law given in teaching manuals was anachronistic and unhelpful, and in […]

The word “language” often suffers a confusion in use because of a partial equivocation in signification.  Sometimes, we use it to signify the species-specifically human capacity to express semantic depth pertaining to a being known as independent of our cognitive activity; in other words, we use the word “language” to indicate our ability for signifying […]

Our Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor, Director of Catholic Studies, and Chair of Philosophy as Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI, was on the Acton Line podcast of the Acton Institute last year (but just let us know recently!). Give a listen here: Reason, nature, and the human good – YouTube

With discussion sessions beginning this coming Saturday (9/23), I would be remiss if I did not put out a final call for registration in our Fall seminars. We have three provocative offerings, each of which promises to confront the errors of modernity in radically differing ways. An Encounter with the Thought of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Excerpt […]