Clients (or guests) come to me for various reasons. Sometimes they want to consider their options at a specific crossroad in their life. Or perhaps some experience has taken their feet out from under them and they need to find a new way forward.

Others feel all tangled up and want to simplify or refocus their lives. Some are battling with despair or depression, trying to find meaning in their lives. It could really be anything that brings them - nothing human is outside of philosophy! - but they come because they need support or assistance to face the particular question of their life.

Philosophical counselling is not characterised by techniques or theories, but by a commitment to consider the client or guest's life situation as unique and significant. We begin with the guest teaching me about his or her situation. Simply being invited to explain yourself to someone who is sincerely interested enables you to speak, and hearing yourself being heard helps you to listen to yourself more seriously as well.
One begins to speak with deeper confidence and clarity, sharpening one's own understanding and bringing hidden facets to light. This way of inquiring into things never really stops, but gradually we become able to work as well at a more abstract level of analysis: what does this person care about? What's real or phony to her? What motivates him? What shapes her perspective?

My role is to encourage the guest to find his or her own best expression of this - whether it is in terms of philosophy, politics, psyche, spirit or whatever - to bring us to the heart of whatever is causing their distress. The philosophical counselling relationship combines skills of the mind (questioning and reasoning) and the experience of dialogue (speaking and listening to each other with care and attention).

Someone once said that the need for philosophy is "above all a need for inner stability and for a standard by which to guide our personal life." In response to my guest's "need for philosophy", philosophical counselling is at once an ethical, political, and pedagogical practice. Inasmuch as it satisfies that need, it is also a therapeutic practice.

In person or by email.