The Philosophy Clinic

This collection of essays and interviews highlights the modern movement of ‘philosophical practice’. Taking their cue and call from Socrates’ summons to ‘know thyself’, contemporary philosophical counsellors and practitioners have returned to the ancient understanding of philosophy as consolation and contemplation, as a life directed to the loving search for wisdom and clarity. Socrates and the Stoics continued this tradition, seeing philosophy primarily as a practical way of living in alignment with oneself and the logos. Thus interpreted, philosophy is a path, teaches a method more than pronounces a thesis, and issues a living praxis devoted to daily spiritual exercises whose aim is nothing less than the transformation of the self – a metamorphosis of the personality. This conception of philosophy’s essence was lost, but was later retrieved by certain philosophers, such as Viktor Frankl and Ludwig Wittgenstein, in the twentieth-century, who have unleashed and uncovered philosophy’s original therapeutic impulse and intent. As such, this book will prove of inestimable value to philosophers, psychologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, counsellors, clients, and students of these disciplines.