Lydia Amir

Should philosophers address the needs of their societies? If the answer is affirmative, and if today's needs are being inadequately answered within the New Age movement for lack of viable alternatives, philosophers' minimal response could be teaching critical thinking outside the academe, and maximal response would be providing relevant wisdom for the world. The first option requires construing logic and epistemology as practical fields. The second requires reforming part of Philosophy as social thinking which provides relevant wisdom for the world. I expose here the maximal response based on an analysis of society's needs forcosmology and spirituality, the New Age Movement's role in providing for those needs, its dangers and imperviousness to criticism, and philosophers' possible responsibility for and interest in answering the needs for a synoptic vision.

Philosophical practice or counseling has been described as a cluster of meth­ods for treating everyday problems and predicaments through philosophical means. Not­withstanding the variety of methods, philosophical counselors seem to share the following tenets: 1. The counselee is autonomous; 2. Philosophical counseling differs from psychological counseling and 3. Philosophical counseling is effective in solving predicaments. A critical examination shows these to be problematic at both theoretical and practical levels. As I believe that philosophical practice is a valuable contribution both to philosophy and to psychology, though not devoid of potential dangers and misuses, I suggest that philosoph­ical counselors reconsider the theoretical and empirical validity of their tenets. Using my experience as a philosophical counselor, I attempt in this paper to contribute to this task while introducing the reader to what are, in my opinion, the main problems in the field.