May 2025

“It doesn’t matter where you encounter chaos. It just matters that you do.” “Braver means there’s more to you than you realized.” “You’re not just less afraid — you’re more…

“You can either live out your vision or someone else’s. There’s no no-vision option.” “In the things you don’t understand is all the potential of the world.” “If your life…

Intro to Psychology

This lecture concludes the social psychology course by exploring social influence, persuasion, compliance, obedience, and group behavior. We examine how individuals are shaped by and also shape the social world…

This lecture covers the fundamentals of clinical psychology, mental illness, and the spectrum of psychopathology. The instructor discusses historical and current approaches to diagnosing and treating mental disorders, including the…

Relationships mark a significant shift in psychological experience. We move from focusing on the individual self to experiencing a different psychology as part of a couple. Examples: “We don’t make…

This lecture explores the concepts of personality and the self through psychological and philosophical lenses. The discussion weaves through historical definitions, trait models, and William James’s conception of the self.…

Let’s talk about what drives people — motives, needs, goals — basically why we do what we do. A motive is a psychological push or pull. It moves us toward…

Lecture 3: Psychology Throughout Life 🧬 Overview of Human Development 🧠 Major Theories of Development Sigmund Freud – Psychosexual Development John Bowlby – Attachment Theory Jean Piaget – Cognitive Development…

Key Insight: We don’t record reality; we construct a usable version of it.

To study something like depression, psychologists might look at:

The Primacy of Beauty

To overcome nihilism, disconnection, and the crises of modernity, we must learn to fall deeply in love with being itself. Beauty is not ornamental — it is essential. It is…

Beauty is the imaginal realization of the good into the true and the true into the good. “Beauty is the glue of the cosmos, the light by which we see…

Next: Brendan Thomas Sammon and Desmond on The God Who Is Beauty.

Welcome back to Lecture 5 of the Primacy of Beauty. In the last session, we explored Scarry’s work and developed a framework for plausibility, identifying it as foundational to rationality…

To be rational and reasonable, one must be metacognitive. That means knowing how to think about thinking and navigating the imaginal—your internal simulation of the minds of others. As children,…

Lecture 3 of The Primacy of Beauty Welcome back. In this lecture, we move deeper into the philosophical and cognitive structure of beauty, continuing from our exploration in Lectures 1…

🧠 Relevance Realization: The Core of Intelligence Modern cognitive science and early AI research (Newell & Simon) revealed that solving problems is not about having more information—it’s about knowing what…

Beauty once held a sacred place in human experience.Plato, Dionysius, Augustine, and Aquinas all saw beauty as a name of God, not just a quality of appearances.It was considered a…

Author: Saint AugustineOriginal Title: De Civitate DeiWritten: c. 413–426 ADTranslation (Penguin Classics): Henry BettensonGenre: Christian Philosophy, Theology, ApologeticsEdition: Penguin Classics, featuring a medieval illumination of heaven and the saints Saint…

A list of major angels in Christian tradition, revered for their roles as messengers, warriors, and protectors of divine order. Note: The number and names of angels vary depending on…

The word consecrate comes from Latin: So, consecrate literally means “to make holy together” or “to dedicate as sacred.” In Latin, the verb is consecrare, meaning to make sacred, dedicate,…

Pretty simple stuff- just sleep deep, stay outdoors walking all day, and eat lots of meat before you sleep. With overflowing vitality comes an overflow of creative output-

What’s poppin, people? It’s Dante.Getting my morning started here in the Centennial Arboretum, right in the heart of Philadelphia. Today I’m thinking about the philosophy of play—what it means to…

To have a breakthrough creatively in the modern world one must remove a few things firstly: Once you start creating from this state of complete detachment from not only the…