writing

  • Literature, Writing, and the Recovery of Man

    A Philosophical Happy Hour inquiring into the virtues of the written wordโ€”on literature, writing, and the possibility of meaningful truths amidst a flood of meaningless words. Walker Percyโ€™s brief meditation, titled โ€œFrom Facts to Fictionโ€ begins autobiographically: a physician trained in the beauty, rigor, and explanatory power of science finds himself forced by illness into…

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  • Art of Grammar II: Composition

    Few persons who have completed high school are entirely incapable of writing. But it is one thing to possess an elementary capacity for writing and another to write with skill. Learning the skill of writingโ€”or what we might term the art of compositionโ€”requires not only practice, but careful habits of thinking. These habits, in order…

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  • Trivium Courses for 2023

    January is just around the corner and we are getting ready for the new year! We have set the calendar for our Trivium Courses in 2023. These courses are treated as foundational at the Lyceum Institute. To be human is to use language. Should we not strive to understand that which makes us human and…

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  • Musings on Extrinsic Formal Causality and Practical Signs

    This is not quite how I envisioned this first blog post turning outโ€ฆ Originally, I had considered writing something on the issue of the political common good, focusing on the plurality of common goods in relation to the political exercise of social justice in its original and true sense (namely, the right ordering of various…

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  • โš˜ The Semiosis of Boethius’s Prosimetric Style in “De consolatione philosophiae” | Wesley C. Yu

    On 24 September 2022 at 2pm ET (see event times around the world here and join the live Q&A here) Wesley Chihyung Yu will present on “The Semiosi of Boethius’s Prosimetric Style in De consolatione philosophiae“. Wesley Chihyung Yu is Associate Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His interdisciplinary research on medieval poetics concentrates…

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  • New Book – Linguistic Signification

    Dr. Kemple has–at long last–finished his Linguistic Signification: A Classical and Semiotic Course in Grammar & Composition. Comprising twenty-six chapters and four appendices, this text is the work of two years concerted effort, but roughly a decade of thinking closely about the nature and function of language, particularly in light of the doctrine of signs–that…

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  • Trivium: Grammar – Fall 2021

    Why study grammar? We might think it a basic necessity for young studentsโ€“elementary students, perhaps into middle schoolโ€“but of little importance by the time of high school, the competent student having gained the adequacy in composition and speech necessary to make him or herself understood to most persons in most situations. At most, an extended…

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  • This Week [2/7-2/13]

    News and Updates (quite a few this week!)

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