White Paper: Environment and Place | How does technology affect our inhabitance of place and the constitution of environment—and how can it benefit them?

White Paper: Pattern-Recognition and Resolution | To thrive in the contemporary technological age, we need not only an improved habit of pattern recognition, but also one of resolution.

White Paper: Poiesis as the Rule of Techne | To begin resolving technology into a more properly human frame of action, we must restore art to a proper poetic vision

Summarizing the second seminar of Humanitas Technica: The Opportunities of Technology. Find a theoretical overview and series of white papers here.

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What is time? It is the explicit aim of this seminar, which will unfold in two parts, to expand our awareness of time’s own nature through a careful study of how it has been conceived and represented through major thinkers and periods of the Western world. This first part of the seminar will span from Grecian Antiquity through the Renaissance. We begin with Aristotle and proceed through the late Scholastic figures of Francisco Suárez and Joannes a Sancto Thoma, with Plotinus, Augustine, Simplicius, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, and Francesco Petrarch, among others, shaping our inquiries along the way.

This course explores the modern conception of a general philosophical hermeneutics, especially as elaborated by two major twentieth-century hermeneutic philosophers: Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005). We shall study their work with particular reference to two guiding concerns: first, the question of universality (i.e., can and ought a philosophical hermeneutics be universal in scope, encompassing interpretation in all realms of understanding?) and, second, the question of method (i.e., can and ought philosophical hermeneutics, especially if taken to be universal in scope, employ one or more methods of interpretation, or is it to be conducted without method?).

“Culture”. We hear the word all the time: the culture is in decline, we are losing our culture, we are fighting a culture war. But ask someone to define culture, and you will likely receive many different answers—answers which consist primarily in the enumeration of different and apparently disparate phenomena. Such nebulously-used terms often obscure deep conceptual confusions, leading to subsequent practical errors. When it comes to “culture”, these conceptual confusions and practical problems have compounded within our technologized way of life.

We commonly find reduction of the body to a possession, a something distinct from the self. This opposition of the self and the body may result in neglect or abuse of the latter. But it may also turn towards a kind of reductive optimization, a movement increasingly popular today. This optimization movement appears to place a high value on the body by tracking its operations, measuring and evaluating them over time, improving physical performance, and alleviating bodily ailments. But it often does so by treating the body as a system of inputs, outputs, efficiencies, and performance metrics rather than as the living expression of a unified human person.

Human Formation in the Digital Age: bringing technology and its possibilities into focus for the flourishing of humankind: live event / 2026.

Commonly, we presume an opposition between “natural” and “artificial”. The “natural” is usually assumed to be that which is untouched by human hands, whereas the “artificial” is that which we have originally brought about, somehow, in contradistinction to what happens by unmolested nature. But this presumes a false anthropological narrative. If we want to understand the real effects of artificial technologies on nature, we need first to understand what the “natural environment” really is.

Recent discussions of artificial intelligence have begun to turn from questions about what these systems can do toward a more difficult question: what does their use leave human beings able to do for themselves? How does their use deprive us of what is properly ours? As users increasingly employ generative systems for their writing, research, prudential evaluation, and refinement of communication, the problem of utility shrinks—in proportion to the problem of a reliance that atrophies the very soul of the human being.

That technology use has effects on our psychological well-being has become, by this point, well-known and widely recognized.  But the concern is ordinarily limited to the distraction, anxiety, addiction, overstimulation, or other faults in control that appear downstream of specific technological devices or frameworks, such as smartphones, social media, or LLMs.  These are real problems, to be sure; but they are merely symptoms of a deeper habituation suffered through unthinking ways of living in an environment thoroughly structured by technological modes of thinking.

Our most common mistake in thinking about the “problem” of technology is, in fact, that we treat it as a “problem” awaiting a solution. But technology is not merely a problem, nor merely a set of tools, nor an autonomous force outside human control. It is a difficulty intrinsic to human life: an expression of human intelligence and making that must be ordered by prudence rather than by technique itself.

Seeking the truth in tradition and in thinking. In this conversation, Dr. Matthew K. Minerd reflects on his intellectual journey, highlighting the influence of language and philosophy—the dance of νοῦς before our eyes—in shaping his understanding of the world and his habits of inquiry. Listen as h