Lyceum Digest #17
Everything published on our Substack from June 1 - 19, 2026 including thoughts on virtue's role within liberalism, students encountering Plato, learning how to live well, and more.
Welcome to our Friday Digest, a bi-weekly email newsletter designed to showcase everything we have published on the Substack over the past two weeks. Below you will find links to our most recent posts. Happy reading!
Has Liberalism Failed?
Patrick Deneen posits that “liberalism,” and America in particular as the only nation founded on liberal principles, was destined to fail. He argues that the American Revolutionaries and Founders did not believe that virtue or good character was necessary, but that institutional “checks and balances” on power were sufficient for good government and human happiness. Click here to read on…Thrasymachus and Students’ First Encounters with Plato’s Philosophy
One of the difficulties in teaching Plato’s philosophy comes from it being written in the form of a dialogue. An advantage of this form for students is that it makes the book’s arguments accessible and lively. It probably comes as a relief for some students that they first encounter philosophy through a work that presents itself as a conversation among several characters, not a dry treatise filled with an extensive and complex vocabulary. Click here to read on…Children and Philosophy
Ask a student to think about the image of a philosopher and the image that comes to mind will likely feature a grey-bearded, elderly man in ancient attire. The love of wisdom, after all, must come from a lifetime of experiences that result in lots of wisdom. Yet in the dystopian novel We, Zamyatin seems to propose an alternative. Click here to read on…Learning or Living? Both!
The year is 2012. A tall, cherubic man from New Jersey is listening to Beirut’s “Monna Pamona” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. His introduction to political theory class has just let out, and he rode the Metro down to let the ideas settle a bit in his soul. His head is swimming with the Portuguese verbs he had been memorizing—in line with a now disproven theory of grammar he’d been working on—the night before, using specialized “memory goggles” he developed in his father’s garage. It is an odd scene. Click here to read on…