Kathryn Elizabeth Cook

Philosophy as a practice, not just an academic discipline, can confront the growing threat to critical thinking. Doing philosophy has the potential to translate innovative methods into cultivating process-oriented learning, critical inquiry, and intellectual resilience. Philosophical Counseling is not a distant or abstract discipline, but an active, engaging practice that trains thinkers in real-time intellectual pursuit through questioning. Instead of emphasizing results, philosophical counseling cultivates habits of questioning, dialogue, and reasoning as exercises of critical thinking. This article addresses why and how philosophers might take an interest in advocating for the relevance of philosophy as a perspective towards the world rather than a specific activity. The moment is ripe when the public conversation is questioning the benefits and consequences of technological advances and realizing that society is changing irreversibly – philosophers are the ones most equipped to inform and lead the search for alternatives.

Doubt and uncertainty are treated as rather abnormal in society. Disturbing states of being, for example anxiety, impostor syndrome, guilt, and confusion, are common phenomena, yet viewed as something to address with psychology, overcome with virtues, or solve with goals and preoccupations to be a good person in decent mental health. If ontological vertigo is understood as a natural state of the human position between the finite and the infinite, the logical conclusion is that human existence is disorienting and uncomfortable. This study looks at the common modes of seeking groundedness: place, status, identity, vocation, potency, meaning, and essence. Existential positions are explored for endorsements of the state of anxiety. Lastly, the authors make an argument for considering ontological vertigo as a natural state instead of seeking false senses of stability.

This article looks at narratives of major religious figures to draw similarities with the philosophical way of dialogue, modeled on the maieutic example set by Socrates, and makes a case that these religious figures ought to be considered and appreciated as philosophers. The study employs Critical Discourse Analysis in order to understand the interactions between religious figures, protagonists, other characters, and the reader. Conclusions address philosophical attitudes and techniques that match the Socratic Method in order to build the case that the religious figure provokes thinking and challenges paradigm as a philosopher does. The examples include being agile in interpretation, using absurdity and paradox, playing with irony, teaching with allegory, to develop meaning in dialogue with the other. The origins of philosophy begin with a way of life, a method of provoking thinking, an interest in examining and questioning what it is to be human. Systemic philosophy and its closely related sister religion have developed into formal disciplines of distinguished paradigms, where dogmatic beliefs are prioritized over freedom of inquiry. Yet this study makes the case that important figures of major religions were working with their interlocutors on how to think, not what to think.

The human being undergoes a permanent fracture, between him and the world, between what he is and what he pretends to be, between reality and his expectations. And as we are obsessed by the concept of infinity, under various forms such as perfection, immortality or the absolute, we are brutally sent back to our own finitude, which makes existence even more difficult. Most of the time, these issues unfold unconsciously, which lead to painful consequences, generating a feeling of dissatisfaction and impotence. But if we make it the object of a deliberate reflection, despite the negative dimension of the content, we have access to ourselves, we engage in a true experience of being, free and joyful. The imposture is imposture only if we ignore its content and its presence, but by becoming a conscious object of reflection, the imposture takes the form of a regulating ideal.