Welcome to PHI, an open international movement defending and discussing the idea of philosophical health and philosophical care

The Vision: Meaning is Healing

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“Philosophical health will be in the 21st century what physical and psychological health were in the 19th and 20th century. At the beginning of the century, it is a luxury for the happy few – by the end of the century, it is a necessity for all.

Philosophical health is a state of fruitful coherence between a person’s (or a collective) way of thinking and speaking and their way of acting, such that the possibilities for a sublime life and healing growth are increased and the needs for self-, intersubjective and interspecies flourishing satisfied.

Five non-exhaustive principles of philosophical health are mental heroism, deep orientation, critical creativity, deep listening and ultimate possibility. A philosophically healthy individual, group, system or protocol ensures that the goals and purposes of the whole are pragmatically aligned with its highest ideals, while respecting the (re)generative, plural, creal future of the individuals concerned by the processes at stake.”
Luis de Miranda

Historians of ideas such as Hadot, Foucault or Nussbaum, have explained how the Ancient Greeks and Romans were concerned with the effects of philosophy upon the subject’s well-being and good life. “A healthy mind in a healthy body”: Plutarch for example considered that philosophy and medicine were a single domain. After a long Christan period during which philosophy became mostly theoretical, a concern for the ideal of philosophical health is slowly re-emerging since the writings of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein among others. The ideal of philosophical care is applied in the last decades in the renewed practice of philosophical counseling. This transnational movement is part of a contemporary rediscovery or recreation of philosophy as a form of care, sometimes called “therapy for the sane”. Philosophical health is an emerging and open concept, and it’s worth exploring its full and multifarious potential without dogmatic lenses.

Health is today one of the main public concerns of humanity. “Good health and well-being” were coalesced by the United Nations into one sustainable development goal for 2030. In the last centuries, physical health and psychological health have been systematised into a societal imperative, sometimes an industry and in some cases a mode of control. In occidental societies, what was a luxury for the few at the beginning of the twentieth century (gymnastics, dietetics, psychotherapy, etc.) became by the end of the same century a necessity or imperative for many, sometimes even an obsession. States are financing and administrating programs of psychological and physical health, in the line of what Foucault called biopolitics, sometimes favouring a modality of therapy grounded on a mechanical, reductionist, quantitative or dualistic view of the mind and body.

The notion of philosophical health possesses a long genealogy. In The Hermeneutics of the Subject, a seminar Foucault gave at the College de France in 1981-82, its prehistory is located in the Platonic and Socratic notion of epimeleia heautou, the care for the self or soul. For Plato, philosophical self-care was a necessary condition in order to become a good citizen or governing actor of the city: the First Alcibiades indicates that there was a correlation between the collective idea of justice and the individual idea of rational self-care. Moreover, such self-care was ultimately not individual, as it was a reconnection with the divine within ourselves, an idea epitomized by Socrates’ daimonion. The Ancient Greek notion of philosophical health articulated personal growth with a shared cosmology, a cosmo-political sense.

In On the Concept of Creal: the Politico-Ethical Horizon of a Creative Absolute (2017), Luis de Miranda argued that such a bridge between the supra-collective and the infra-individual needs to be reconstructed today via a global social contract, a shared cosmology. The problem with our dominant biophysical or psychological versions of health is that they often implicitly promote a solipsistic and materialist idea of the self, sometimes based on the anthrobotic idea of tech-enhanced standardised bodies, bodies without singular spirit or personhood and without esprit de corps. In the end, mechanistic views, precisely because they might seem efficient in the short-term from a functional perspective, might lead to a general adoption of implicit forms of transhumanism, a constant and anxious management of humanity via chemicals, automation, mimetism and biotechnology that generates guilt or self-contempt among crypto-cyborgs without a deeper purpose nor sense of the possible other than competition or survival.

In a sort of vicious loop, metaphysical worry is sometimes interpreted as “depression”, “bipolarism” or others form of mental diagnosis promoted by the biomedical industry. Moreover, the current high-speed development of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics is generating an artificially deterministic society in which existential choices tend to be increasingly supervised by the state or corporations. Once we are statistically told by machines-who-know-better which education, partner, divertissement, health habits, profession or workplace to adapt to, the episteme of the modern subject, based on the ideal of self-determination, might collapse, generating a wave of pathologies of free will, the premises of which are already observable today. Cognitive diversity and philosophical health are under threat; the rise of a normative form of self-development sends wrong messages about “the right way” to live in order to be successful or “happy”, “well-adjusted”.

Babies come into the world through a canal which at its origin is a kaleidoscope of infinite possibility, but which ends at its social end in this more or less limited image called reality-as-we-know-it. Some souls, however, try to regain some control of the kaleidoscope, by returning mentally and experientially to the creal source, a good sense of the possible (what de Miranda calls “eudynamia“). All too often the monoscopic imperatives of society lash our faces in denying us access to our deeper aspirations. The world needs (meta)cognitive diversity, an explosion of philosophical colours and a generous palette of ways of doing and thinking. In recurring to a philosophical counsellor or to autonomous personal philosophical thinking, human beings are looking anew for deeper, more singular and more sustainable forms of care and cognition, respectful of our natural embodiment as well as of non-human entities (from animals to ideals). The time is certainly ripe to answer the question What is Philosophical Health? in a programmatic way, and perhaps even more importantly: What can philosophical health do? How can intellectual care improve our intercreations?

Last but not least, philosophical health is about epistemic justice. A person who lacks the epistemic resources, including conceptual frameworks to make sense of events and perceptions, name their experiences, verbalise their deep meaning accurately, and account for them to others, also lacks a framework into which she can fit a sense of purpose without distortion.

Get in touch if you agree that the study of Philosophical Health is to be developed and if, in one way or another, you are part of the international movement for philosophical health: luis@philosophicalparlour.com.

Last but no least, please consider donating a symbolic sum to help the movement expand. Read more about the donation purpose here: https://gofundme.com/f/philosophicalhealth

MEET OUR PHILOSOPHICAL HEALTH INTERNATIONAL ADVOCATES

SWEDEN Luis de Miranda, PhD, is the initiator and founder of Philosophical Health International. Author of philosophical essays and novels translated into various languages, he is an academic researcher in Scandinavia and a philosophical practitioner worldwide, the founder of The Philosophical Parlour, through which he offers philosophical counseling. In 2019, Luis gave a presentation at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris in which he called for a movement of applied research in philosophical health. He also collaborates with international corporations on philosophical health programs and crealectic innovation, such as Vattenfall in Sweden or Teaminside in France. Since 2022, researchers and institutions worldwide are applying his SMILE_PH method of dialogue.

CHINA Xiaojun Ding holds a PhD in Philosophy on “Analytic Philosophical Practice” (2016, Nanjing University) and is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Xi’an Jiaotong University (China). Her priority lines of research are philosophical practice, logic and critical thinking, analytic philosophy, experimental philosophy, epistemology, philosophy of science and technology, moral psychology and positive psychology.

USA Lou Marinoff, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at The City College of New York, author of several international bestsellers — Plato Not Prozac, Therapy for the Sane, The Middle Way, The Power of Dao –, founding President of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), editor of APPA’s Journal, Philosophical Practice. APPA trains philosophers to render services to individuals, groups and organisations, and has certified practitioners in more than 30 US states and 25 countries. The New York Times called Lou Marinoff “the world’s most successful marketer of philosophical counseling.”

USA Elliot D. Cohen, PhD, is one of the principal figures of philosophical counseling in the United States. He is founder and editor of International Journal of Applied Philosophy and International Journal of Philosophical Practice; co-founder and Executive Director of the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA); and President of the Institute for Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation (a method he himself developed). Author of twenty seven books and numerous articles in philosophical counseling, applied philosophy, and professional ethics, his books include, Making Peace with Imperfection, End the Cycle of Criticism, and Embrace Self-Acceptance, translated in several languages.

SWEDEN Tulsa Jansson is the founder and chairman of the Swedish Society for Philosophical Practice (SSFP). Lecturer in Human Rights at Malmö University, she has a background in moral and political philosophy, with an ongoing PhD in Ethics. She trained as philosophical practitioner in the USA, Canada, France, and Norway. She is the author of the book Du had svaren! Filosofi till Vardags (2013) [You Have the Answer! Philosophy in the Everyday Life]. She also works as a training consultant in analytic thinking and dialogical skills for organisations.

UK Anna Katharina Schaffner, PhD, used to be a Professor of Cultural History at the University of Kent. She is now a coach and a writer and specialises on working with the exhausted. In her coaching practice, she combines frameworks from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and co-active coaching with ancient wisdom, especially Stoicism. She uses historical, philosophical, and sociological insights as active healing ingredients in the coaching process. Anna has written a long history of exhaustion (Columbia University Press, 2016) and The Art of Self-Improvement: Ten Timeless Truths (Yale University Press, 2021).

INDIA Balaganapathi Devarakonda, PhD, is professor of Philosophy at the University of Delhi, India. His research interests include Philosophical counseling, Indian conception of Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Social and political philosophy. Bala is a Certified philosophical counselor by the American Philosophy Practitioners Association (APPA). He implements philosophical tools from Vedanta and Buddhism from the Indian tradition in his practice. He has edited a special issue of the Journal of APPA, Philosophical Practice on Indian perspectives of Philosophical counseling (2021).

FINLAND Eeva K. Kallio, PhD, is adjunct professor at the Universities of Jyväskylä and Tampere, Finland. She is a specialist in adult developmental psychology. Founding member and Honorary President of the European Society for Research in Adult Development, and member of the Finnish philosophical practitioners FIVE, she is generally interested in the philosophical Taoist metaphysics. She has experience in participating, facilitating and leading philosophical discussion groups, e.g. contemplative philosophy groups. She is the editor of Development of Adult Thinking (Routledge, 2020).

UK Michael Loughlin, PhD, is Professor in Applied Philosophy and co-director of the University of West London’s European Institute for Person-Centred Health and Social Care. He has written extensively on the relationship between knowledge, science and value in clinical practice, on the relationship between epistemology and ethics, and analyses of the nature and role of rationality, evidence, judgement and intuition in medicine and health care. In 2014 he was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the European Society for Person Centered Healthcare and awarded the Senior Vice President’s medal for Excellence, for his foundational work in the Philosophy of Person-Centred Care.

USA Carol S. Gould, PhD, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Center for Future Mind, in the Brain Institute at Florida Atlantic University, where she has been a Professor of Philosophy for thirty years. She has taught and publishes widely in Ancient Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Psychiatry, and Philosophy of Aging. She is certified by the APPA for both individual counseling and corporate consulting. Her years as a cellist and Pilates practitioner have given her a strong belief in the mind/body connection.

CANADA Peter Raabe, PhD, is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in the use of philosophy in the prevention and treatment of “mental illnesses”. He received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia for his research in Philosophical Counselling. He is retired Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of the Fraser Valley (UFV) in Abbotsford, Canada, where he taught a variety of courses including philosophy of mind, reasoning, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and a specialized upper-level course of philosophy for students and practitioners of counselling and psychotherapy. He is the author of Philosophy’s Role in Counseling and Psychotherapy (Jason Aronson) and Philosophical Counseling: Theory and Practice, (Praeger). He is co-editor of Women in Philosophical Counseling (Lexington).

ITALY Elisabetta Basso, PhD, is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École normale supérieure, Lyon and associated member of the Centre d’Archives en Philosophie, Histoire et Édition des Sciences (CNRS-ENS Paris). She is a member of the Michel Foucault editorial board. Her primary research goals are directed toward the relationship between anthropology, phenomenology, and psychopathology. Among her publications is the edition of Foucault’s manuscript Binswanger et l’analyse existentielle (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS, 2021).

NORWAY Line Joranger, PhD, is professor in social, cultural and community psychology at the university of South-Eastern Norway. She is an intellectual historian with a PhD in psychology from the University of Oslo. She is the author of several books and scientific papers that problematise the connection between epistemology and clinical mental health care. She has recently been appointed by the Norwegian ministry of knowledge to sit in The Norwegian National Research Ethics Committee.

USA Drew Leder, PhD, is a professor at Loyola University Maryland, with an M.D. from Yale University. His latest book is The Healing Body: Creative Responses to Illness, Aging, and Affliction (Northwestern University Press, 2023). Building on the phenomenology of the lived body, he examines strategies used by individuals to cope well with chronic illness or incapacities. His trilogy of books on embodiment begun with his highly influential The Absent Body (U. of Chicago, 1990). In addition to extensive publications in the philosophy of medicine, he has written on aging in Spiritual Passages (Tarcher/Penguin Putnam), the experience of long-term incarceration in The Soul Knows No Bars (Rowman & Littlefield), and published popular books on enriching life through cross-cultural spiritual practices.

GREECE Katerina Apostolides is a philosophical counselor in Athens, Greece. She helps people bring a philosophical perspective to challenges they experience in the workplace or their personal lives, including burnout, inauthenticity, alienation from or conflict with others, or just the search for greater meaning and purpose. She holds a master degree in political science and has taught political philosophy. She also practices alternative dispute resolution. Other than these things, she enjoys energy healing, tai chi, and karate.

SWEDEN Richard Levi, MD, PhD (Karolinska Institutet), MBA (Stockholm School of Economics) is professor of rehabilitation medicine at Linköping University and board certified in Neurology and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. As practitioner at the Linköping University Hospital, he helps persons with severe mobility impairments regain a certain quality of life, a process for which he believes a philosophical approach is helpful.

CHINA Tianqun Pan, Ph.D, is a professor of Philosophy at Nanjing University. His research areas are logic, philosophical practice, philosophy of science and technology, philosophy of AI, and Game Theory. He has supervised several M.A or Ph. D students who got their degrees in philosophical practice. He edited Readings on Philosophical Practice (Nanjing University Press, 2023). He is a member of the editorial board of Philosophical Practice (USA), the Journal of Humanities Therapy (Korea), and the Journal of Philosophical Practice and Counseling (Korea). He is one of the main researchers in philosophical practice in China.

USA Kate Mehuron, Ph.D. is a Philosophical Counselor certified by the American Philosophical Practitioners Association and an Academic Psychoanalyst certified by the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Her overall focus is the importance of philosophical counseling as both a critique of and alternative to biomedical mental health diagnosis. She teaches “Contemporary Philosophical Practices” at Eastern Michigan University and is the author of numerous articles on the practice of philosophical counseling.

FRANCE Salim Mokaddem, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Montpellier University, France. He is also a counselor in education and a specialist of medical epistemology. He believes that healing arises from philosophical attention and from the ethopoietic practice proper to the activity of judgment. Philosophy cures the will of its procrastination in history and becomes a process of self-care analogous to therapy.

SWEDEN Niklas Juth, PhD, is Professor of Medical Ethics at Uppsala University, with a clinical focus, after a long career at Karolinska Institutet, where he worked as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor of medical ethics at the Department of Learning, Management and Ethics. His research is focused on the ethical dilemmas that arise at the intersection of political philosophy and medical ethics. In particular questions concerning autonomy and justice in health care. In recent years, his research has been focused on compulsory care in both psychiatric and somatic settings. He has also worked with priorities in relation to orphan drugs, and issues relating to end-of-life care and screening.

UK Ashwini Mokashi, PhD, a member of APPA, was educated in Philosophy at the University of Pune in India, King’s College London, and earned a business degree from Rutgers University, NJ. She taught Philosophy at Pune in Wadia and Ferguson Colleges. In October 2021, she joined the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies in the UK. Her first book was published in 2019 and is entitled ‘Sapiens and Sthitaprajna: A Comparative Study in Seneca’s Stoicism and the Bhagavadgita.’ Her current writing project is about meditation.

UK Sorin Baiasu, PhD, is Professor of Philosophy at Keele University, Director of the Keele-Oxford-St Andrews Kantian (KOSAK) Research Centre, Chair of the Steering Committee of the Kantian Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, at Oxford University. He teaches an advanced undergraduate module on Philosophical Counselling and examines the metaphilosophical suggestion that philosophy proper should be done through philosophical counselling, via interpersonal relations.

ROMANIA Andrei Simionescu-Panait, Ph.D., is a philosophy Lecturer at the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, Romania. He also teaches at the Master in Philosophical Counselling program, West University of Timisoara. Besides his teaching activities, he works as a philosophical counselor and critical thinking coach, being certified by the Institute de pratiques philosophiques in Paris. His clients include psychologists, teachers, and company employees. He recently published The Reconciled Body (Zeta Books 2021), a phenomenology of elegance. He researches new ways to combine phenomenology and Socratic dialogue techniques.

USA Kat Peoples, PhD, studied Existential Psychology since starting as an undergraduate at Duquesne University (Pittsburgh, PA). She earned both her Bachelor’s and her Master’s in Psychology at Duquesne University before moving over to earn her Doctorate in Counselor Education at Duquesne University. Dr. Peoples currently works as a core faculty member in the Counselor Education and Supervision Doctoral program at Walden. She has written books, book chapters, and journal articles on numerous topics related to counseling and philosophy, most notably how to write phenomenological dissertations.

USA Babette Babich is an American philosopher and author. She is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, based at the Lincoln Center campus in New York City and visiting professor of theology, religion and philosophy at the University of Winchester in the UK. She has written eleven books, including most recently Günther Anders’ Philosophy of Technology (2021) and several publications on Nietzsche. As a world-renowned specialist of Nietzschean scholarship, she is also executive editor of New Nietzsche Studies, a journal she founded in 1996.

POLAND Eli Kramer, PhD, is an associate professor at the Department of Ethics of the Institute of Philosophy, University Wrocław. His work explores philosophical health from the perspective of philosophy as a way of life research and practice. He also explores the limitations and challenges of promoting philosophical health within professional philosophy. He co-edits a new book series with Brill, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Text and Studies.” His first single-authored monograph is on the nature and role of the associated philosophical life (as distinct from philosophy as a discipline): Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume One: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (Brill, 2021).

ITALY Patrizia F. Salvaterra, PhD, is an APPA-certified philosophical counsellor based in Verona, Italy. Her research includes Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Ethics and Philosophy of History. She helps individuals and people inside organizations to define goals and reach better performances and quality of life. She authored about 80 articles on philosophical or communication matters. Among them: “Postmodernism, an incomplete factor. On Lyotard and others”; “Louis Dumont, Homo aequalis – Genesis and triumph of the economic ideology”.

INDIA Raja Rosenhagen, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India. He is in general interested in ways of getting clearer on how our background beliefs and other mental states may affect our experience and what the implications of such effects would be. He is also interested in Indian Philosophy (especially Jainism, Bhakti, and Buddhism) and has published and presented variously on Iris Murdoch. He is an adjunct member of the APPA.

GERMANY Ricardo Morte Ferrer is a Spanish Lawyer, Data Protection and Compliance Consultant, Lead Auditor ISO 37001 (Anti-Bribery Systems) and APPA Certified Affiliate. President of the Laboratorio de Investigación e Intervención Filosófica y Ética. Member of the Board of the International Applied Ethics and Technology Association. He is also Member of the Working Group Digitization & Health of the German Academy for Ethichs in Medicine, where he is Head of the Subgroup AI, Big Data (New Technologies) & Data Protection/Data Security. He is a PhD Candidate at the University of Granada.

USA Suraiya Luecke is researching Mind, Language, and Embodied Cognition at the University of Edinburgh, and previously studied Neurobiology and Public Health at UC Berkeley. Her current research examines the tightly-coupled relationship between our breath and the quality of our subjective experiences. She is interested in using philosophy as a tool to bring together different sciences and practices around the subjects of mental health, interpersonal health, and ecological health.

SOUTH AFRICA Richard Sivil, PhD, is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of KwaZulu-Natal University, South Africa. He works in philosophy as practical wisdom directed at bringing about / increasing well-being. His doctoral research focuses on exploring alternative visions of philosophizing as a way of life, in the line of Pierre Hadot and of the Stoics, the Epicureans, Kant, Dewey, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

ECUADOR Dennis Schutijser is a former University Lecturer, specialized in the areas of Practical Philosophy and Applied Ethics. He is also a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Toulouse in France. His research is dedicated to Narrativity as a basis for a Care of the Other. Dennis holds a degree both in Philosophy (France) and in Humanistic Sciences (Netherlands), during which he specialized in Philosophy as a Way of Life. He currently works as governance advisor and as an independent philosophical counsellor.

SWEDEN Miriam van der Valk studied philosophy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as well as with the American Philosophical Practitioners Association in New York. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, she hosts public events, moderates panel talks, organizes courses and workshops, records podcasts, writes, lectures and coaches through her philosophical practice, Filoprax.

CROATIA Zoran Kojcic, PhD, is a philosopher and author living in Croatia. He has worked as a school teacher and philosophical counsellor and practitioner since 2011. Zoran works as a coordinator on several international projects regarding ethics, philosophical practice and dialogue practices. He received his PhD in philosophy at Sofia University in Bulgaria, with the thesis on performance-oriented philosophical counselling.

ITALY Roberta Gucinelli, PhD in Philosophy, University of Geneva, is Member of the Max Scheler Gesellschaft and of the Scientific Committee of the Research Centre “FormaMentis”, University of Verona. She works in Phenomenology, Phenomenological Psychopathology, Aesthetics (Art and Resilience, Axiological Perception, Affective Relevance of Aesthetic Experience), Emotions and Value-Theories.

BANGLADESH Md Shahidul Islam is an associate professor of philosophy at Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Nagarjuna, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion, Meta-Philosophy, Logic, and Argumentation theory. He is interested in developing the idea of philosophical health in connection with the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Nagarjuna.

CROATIA Darija Rupčić Kelam, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of J. J. Strossmayer , in Osijek, Croatia. She is interested primarily in bioethics, philosophy of medicine, narrative medicine and how to restore, help and heal “broken life stories” through philosophical and narrative techniques. She is an expert in the bioethical aspects of the status of the human embryo.

PAKISTAN Zohaib Zuby is a Professor at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan. He has an interdisciplinary background with technical competence in Architecture and Academic interests in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Counselling, Sufism & Islamic Reformism, Neoliberalism & Post-Coloniality. He is a pioneer in bringing Philosophy for Children (P4C) to Pakistan and continues to teach Philosophy as Therapy at high school level. He is also co-founder of Be-khudi – the first platform to produce Guided Meditation Programs in Urdu and English among other projects promoting mindfulness meditation and conscious living.

SWEDEN Liza Haglund, Phd, is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Södertörn University in Stockholm (Sweden). Haglund has managed several “philosophy with children” projects since the middle of the 90s. Her philosophy books for children and teenagers have been translated into Arabic, Korean, German and Persian. She is a member of the board for Filosofiska, a non-for-profit organisation that runs one primary school, two pre-schools in Sweden with philosophy as the core tonality, and a school for children in need in Nepal.

AUSTRALIA Matthew Sharpe, PhD and associate Professor, teaches philosophy at Deakin University, in Melbourne, Australia. He is coauthor of Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions (Bloomsbury, 2020), and cotranslator of Pierre Hadot’s Selected Writings: Philosophy as Practice (Bloomsbury, 2020). In the last decade, in addition to an increased focus on Stoicism, he has become interested in recovering a sense of enlightenment philosophy, from beneath layers of postmodern and neoconservative misrepresentations, and wrote The Other Enlightenment: Self-Estrangement, Race, and Gender (2022).

NEW ZEALAND Bettina Mielenz works as a philosophical counselor in New Zealand since 2013. Trained in philosophical client counseling by the American philosophical practitioners Association, she works for Centrecare Counseling Waimate and her clients include Maori, the Indigenous culture, as well as persons with mental health disorders or offenders. She developed a blend of ancient Eastern and European philosophical thoughts which aims at bringing out the Higher Self in each client, using common, everyday language to convey sometimes complicated concepts to an audience which has little awareness of philosophy.

AUSTRIA Bernhard Geissler is a PhD researcher at the University of Graz, where he also works as an assistant at the department of philosophy. His research focuses on topics related to the fields of theoretical psychology and the philosophy of psychiatry. His methodological approach is strongly linked to the phenomenological tradition. Alongside his philosophical work, Bernhard is a board member of the Austrian Society for Phenomenology and is a psychotherapist with a philosophical background (Husserl).

TURKEY Abdullah Basaran (Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University) is a research associate and philosophy lecturer at Hitit University of Turkey. In 2018, his first book, Postmodern: Felsefe, Edebiyat, Nekahet (The Postmodern: Philosophy, Literature, Convalescence) was published in Turkish. His current research mostly focuses on literary and philosophical hermeneutics, reading theories, and phenomenology of body and place.

GERMANY Anđelija Milić is doing a PhD at the University of Rostock, where she tries to ontologically ground the patient as the primary point of creating further relations with illness and doctors. The interest in philosophy of medicine has been complemented with the research in the ancient, medieval, and philosophy of religion and science. In some of these fields, she has been working as a teaching assistant at the University of Niš, Serbia, for several years.

UK Constantinos Athanasopoulos, PhD, is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) has a PhD from Glasgow University on Wittgenstein and Sartre. He has taught Philosophy in Greece, Italy, and the UK. Currently he is an Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University in Scotland, teaching a course in Thought and Experience. He has worked in the area of Philosophical Practice for more than 10 years.

IRELAND Andrew Keltner is the Director of the Philosophical Practices Certificate Program and a PhD Researcher in Dublin, Ireland, with the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS), as well as a philosophical practitioner with the Institute of Philosophical Practices in Paris. He is trained in the Socratic method, and has worked with NGO’s, individuals, academic researchers, and has organized philosophical cafes. Andrew earned his MA in Philosophical Counselling and Consultancy from the West University of Timisoara.

USA Aliena Baruch is an Israeli American polymath. Previously, editor-in-chief of ‘Hebrew News’ in Los Angeles, and head of Content & Communications at the Tel-Aviv Foundation in Israel. An APPA certified philosophical counselor, she is also a mediator (trained at the Los Angeles DA’s Dispute Resolution Program), a certified life coach, artist, energy healer, editor, copywriter, and ghostwriter.

INDIA Navneet Chopra, PhD,is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Delhi University, India. He teaches Philosophical Counseling, cognitive sciences, Heideggerian phenomenology and Zen Buddhism. He uses insights from the latter disciplines in the Philosophical Practice/Counseling. His research team explores fundamental issues in philosophy of psychiatry like defining mental illness and wellbeingness, epimeleia heautou, dysfunctional habits, personality disorders, phenomenological-existential and Zen perspectives, having implications for enhancing what he calls “philosophical-quotient” (PQ) and search for a meaning in life.

TURKEY Miray Yazgan, PhD, teaches ethics, applied philosophy, Chinese philosophy and Indian philosophy at Istanbul University in Turkey. She has published two books: Ancient Chinese Philosophy and Science of Logic and Ancient-Medieval Indian Philosophy and Science of Logic. She is interested in applying the knowledge and methodology of Far East Philosophy to Philosophical Counseling.

USA Kevin Cales, PhD, is an adjunct professor at Radford University, Roanoke College, and Virginia Western Community College, where he teaches Ancient Greek Philosophy, Ethics, and Introduction to Philosophy. He received certification in philosophical counseling and business consulting from the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. At Roanoke College, he runs a research project that analyzes and assesses the efficacy of individual philosophical counseling for understanding, navigating, and assessing everyday problems.

ISRAEL Ora Gruengard obtained her Ph.D in Philosophy from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and taught philosophy at that same university, Tel Aviv University and various other institutes, mainly in Israel. She also studied economics, cognitive psychology and family therapy. Her central theme of interest is self- and other persons’ knowledge, its social and social-scientific relevance and its cultural context. In her work “Introverted, Extroverted and Perverted Controversy: Jung against Freud”, she explored these aspects with regards to various psychoanalytical approaches. She practices philosophical counseling since 1992.

SWEDEN Charlotta Ingvoldstad Malmgren is a certified genetic counsellor working at Karolinska University Hospital. At the Center for fetal medicine, she meets expectant parents in situations related to prenatal diagnosis helping them in understanding, coping and accepting their situation. Charlotta also works with advocacy work and patient collaboration at the Centre for Rare Diseases. Her primary research focus is genetic counselling, patient perspectives and ethics within genetics and genomics including research questions on decision making. Charlotta is also chair of the Swedish Society for Medical Genetics and Genomics Ethics and Policy Group.

DENMARK Mads Højmark, MA in Philosophy, is a Board Member of The Danish Society for Philosophical Practice (DSFP) and holds an EMCC Global Individual Accreditation at Senior Practitioner Level. He has been working mainly within the field of people, leadership, and organizational development. In the roles of coach, counselor, teacher, and facilitator, he deals with topics such as change and transition, stress and crises, career and competence, motivation and well-being, conflict and cooperation. Mads has a passion for mythological narratives ranging from the Old Norse Eddas and the Graeco-Roman tradition to Arthurian romances and the legends of the Holy Grail. He is the founder of Thaumas.dk which aims at exploring the regenerative reservoirs and palingenetic potentials for a transformative thaumaturgy in the crossfield between Mythos and Logos.

INDIA Madhulika Sharma is a certified associate in client counseling from the American Philosophical Practitioners Association in New York, USA. She completed her master’s in philosophy from Ramjas College, University of Delhi, India. She is currently working as a philosophical counselor in India, where she conducts individual sessions, group counseling, couples counseling, and also provides training to psychological first aid volunteers.

UK Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Education at Bath Spa University. He is Director, founder, and consultant of FlourishCafé, a social enterprise which uses creative approaches to supporting community flourishing. He is also a contributing member to the Leadership for Flourishing Group supported by Harvard University and Oxford University. Eri’s PhD research uses conceptual analysis as a method for thinking about human flourishing. He uses insights from Wittgenstein, Hacker, and others to explore philosophy as a form of conceptual therapeutic practice to addressing a wide range of problems (personal, social, academic).

CHINA Ray Cheung Wai Lok is a PhD student from the Philosophy Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He uses formal theories, such as decision theory, game theory, probability theory, modal logic, computability theory, learning theory, and connectionism, to describe the metaphysics of action. He believes the resultant logic of action shall empower us to understand the failure forms of right acts – be they immoral, or imprudent.

UK Jerneja Rebernak, based in London, has 12 years of international experience in managing Higher Education, Arts and Cultural sectors projects engaging enhance cultural cooperation through artistic programmes on regional and urban levels. She initiated the Planetary Institute to engage with situated practice based research on altered states of consciousness through a philosophical angle to connect our material and imaginal environments.

DENMARK Jeanette Bresson Ladegaard Knox, PhD in philosophy with additional degrees in Theatre and Religious Studies, is Associate Professor in Health Humanities and Medical Ethics at Copenhagen University. A former President of the Danish Society for Philosophical Practice, her work examines the contribution of the humanities in medicine and health care, developing the concept of existential health and care of self. She has carried out numerous participatory and qualitative research projects within cancer rehabilitation, chronic disabilities and pediatrics, usually drawing on the philosophical traditions of existential phenomenology and hermeneutics, philosophy of existence and dialogue, moral and value theories, ancient philosophy, and stoicism.

UK Dominic Garcia, PhD, (Newcastle University) is a teacher of philosophy in Malta within the Department of Education and the author of Rethinking Ethics Through Hypertext (Emerald Publishing Group UK, 2020), in which he proposes a concept of discursive expressions through the use hypertextual writing. His project seeks to create a redemptive technology that may yield a better understanding, interpretation and judgement of ethical issues and actions within a mode of discourse that is more emancipatory.

INDIA & UK Spriha Roy is a Commonwealth Scholar at Bath Spa University, currently pursuing an MA in Environmental Humanities. Her field of interests include Moral Philosophy, Environmental Ethics, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Cultural Landscapes, Feminisms and Modern Western thought. She holds a graduate and a postgraduate degrees in Philosophy from University of Delhi, India. She is a volunteer at the Bath Medical Museum (BMM) in Bath, UK which aims at providing well-being services within the experience of a museum.

UK Peter Jones, MRes, is a Community Mental Health Nurse, NHS Professionals with a B.A.(Hons) in Philosophy and Computer Science. He studies and highlights the need for a generic model or conceptual framework across all health and social care disciplines and within education. This model facilitates person-centred care and can encompass the self through to population and planetary health; reflective practice, critical thinking and problem solving.

UK Angelos Sofocleous is a PhD Researcher in Philosophy at the University of York. In his research, he examines disturbances in interpersonal relationships in lived experiences of depression. He provides an analysis of what it means when depressed individuals describe their experience as alienating, isolating, or unhomelike. As a Teaching Assistant, he teaches ethics, epistemology, logic, and ancient philosophy. He has also collaborated with the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning in teaching courses in existentialism and stoicism.

INDIA Bhumika Kanjilal holds a Ph.D in Philosophy on “Issues Relating to Universals”( 2012, Jadavpur University, India) and is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Durgapur Government College, India. Her areas of interest and research are Metaphysics, Philosophy of Education, and Political Philosophy. She holds a special interest in the Philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the author of Freedom from the Known and What are you doing with your life?

USA Jarrod Hyam, PhD, taught philosophy and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire (USA). His interdisciplinary research integrated philosophy and the anthropology of religion. He was particularly interested in how philosophical disciplines and praxis may address the ongoing mysteries of health and healing. He completed the PhD at the University of Sydney in the Department of Indian Subcontinental Studies, after conducting ethnographic fieldwork in India and Nepal. He passed away in 2022 but was one of the first persons to support the Philosophical Health Movement.

AUSTRIA Markus Gole, PhD, is a board-certified clinical psychologist, philosopher, occasional lecturer at the University of Applied Science in Hamburg and other institutions. He is the author of Physicalism as a Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (2021). In his work, he is primarily interested in the intersection of philosophy and psychology and the benefits arising from this endeavor. This is true for his academic research (philosophy of mind, analytic philosophy, philosophy of psychology, clinical and health psychology, affective neuroscience) as well as his treatment approach, for instance using Clinical philosophy in the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

SCOTLAND Marsha Burke is an artist and teacher. She studied Fine Art at University of East London, then gained a PGCE from the London Institute of Education (1997). She taught in Secondary Education in Scotland for 15 years, mostly in Special Educational Needs (including a Secure Unit for teenagers with emotional and behavioural difficulties and an Autism Unit attached to a mainstream school). She is now also studying music at the University of Glasgow.

USA Susi Ferrarello is Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay. Among her books: Husserl’s Ethics and Practical Intentionality(Bloomsbury 2015), Phenomenology of Sex, Love and Intimacy (Routledge, 2018), Human Emotions and the Origin of Bioethics (Routledge, 2021), The Role of Bioethics in Emotional Problems (Routledge, 2021), The Ethics of Love (Routledge, 2022). She writes for Psychology Today and works also as a philosophical counselor.

GERMANY Sören E. Schuster is a doctoral candidate of philosophy at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and fellow at Institut für Wirtschaftsgestaltung. His research pursuits include philosophy of economics, history of economic thought, philosophy of management (including an interview booklet on Chief Philosophy Officers), and Friedrich Nietzsche. Having established his expertise within the Berlin startup ecosystem, he now provides culture consultancy to companies.

SWEDEN Eleanor Byrne, PhD, is a philosopher at Linköping University (Sweden), Ph.D. from the University of York under the supervision of Professor Matthew Ratcliffe. She is a specialist in the philosophical analysis of Chronic Fatigue and post-covid, trained in semi-structured phenomenological interviews investigating first-person experiences of the illness(es). She also works on grief, specifically questions of grief’s object and pathological grief, and epistemic injustice in medical contexts.

GREECE/UK Christos Sideras, FRCPsych, is a Consultant Psychiatrist at the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine, and Honorary Lecturer at University College London. After some neuroscience work, he shifted to philosophy, and is now doing a PhD in philosophy of emotions. He has an interest in psychoanalytic thinking and practice, is a council member of the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and is also convenor for the UCL Embodied Psychotherapies Series. He is exploring the interface between various therapies and philosophical practices.

Get in Touch!

The Philosophical Health International Movement
Dr Luis de Miranda: crealectics@gmail.com

The Philo sophical Parlour, Stockholm