Lou Marinoff

Stand-Up Philosophy

This chapter provides an overview of philosophy. Philosophy forms the foundation of all rational inquiry — whether scientific, theological, ethical, axiological, aesthetic — and is the wellspring of even idle speculation. People hold strong beliefs about themselves and others, and the world, and whether these are well or ill-founded is a matter of philosophical examination. People make daily inferences about themselves and others, and the world, and whether these are sound or unsound is a matter of philosophical rigor. People obey or break laws and follow or defy customs, according to their philosophical interpretations of justice, liberty, and right. People seek, find, or deny meaning and purpose in their lives and deaths, according to their philosophical conceptions of these things. People make myriad choices on a daily basis, guided by their philosophical deliberations or blinded by a conspicuous lack thereof. People constantly wonder who and where they are, how they came to be who and where they are, and who they shall become, and in what place and by what means and to what end they shall become it. These are quintessentially philosophical questions.

The Making of a Profession

This chapter examines the relation between pioneering pedagogy and professionalism, ultimately, with a view to justifying the establishment of accredited degree programs in philosophical practice. It develops a broader perspective on professionalism, by examining four criteria necessary for the legislative recognition of a profession in New York State and by showing how philosophical practice currently satisfies three of those four criteria. In New York, the recognition of a profession falls under the aegis of the Department of Education. The four necessary criteria certainly justify this situation: programs of training at universities or institutes chartered by the State and accredited by professional accrediting bodies, established criteria (including an examination) for certification of practitioners, established body of knowledge as reflected in the publication of reference books and professional journals and regularly scheduled scientific meetings, and established code of ethics.

Chapter 12 – Hanging Out a Counseling Shingle: FAQ

This chapter discusses numerous questions related to publicity, promotion, and packaging. The qualifications for becoming a philosophical counselor are also explained in the chapter. One can often find a wise person, who gives excellent advice on all kinds of practical matters, among family elders, or among elders of almost any community or tribe. Friends can also be very helpful. While anyone blessed with a combination of common sense, experience, insight, and compassion can provide useful counsels, such a person is not necessarily a philosophical counselor. Nor is anyone, who simply earns a PhD in Philosophy, necessarily a philosophical counselor; academic degrees alone are not enough. An average professor of philosophy is not a philosophical counselor because, although he possesses more than enough philosophical expertise, and can apply philosophical conceptions in abstract or hypothetical contexts, he has little or no conception of how to apply them to actual human problems.

National, International, and Inter-Professional Relations

This chapter describes the national, international, and inter-professional relations. Most institutions (as opposed to institutes) are larger, more influential, and longer-lived than the people, who found them and serve them. An institution can generally accomplish far more than an individual; even the most reclusive genius, who happens to be a composer, painter, or writer needs institutions (i.e., orchestras, museums, publishers) to bring his works into the light of public awareness. Globalization is certainly making national political barriers more permeable to economic; and therefore, also to cultural interchange, nation-states themselves are hardly relinquishing their respective political identities. In fact, they are proliferating to express such identity. Therefore, an obvious and natural way for philosophical practice to develop is through a national organization of practitioners. Several nations have already followed this path and many more are in the process of following it.

Philosophy with Groups—and Groupies

The kinds of activities in which human groups can indulge range from sacred to profane, refined to vulgar, and noble to common. Philosophers, as thinkers, have a well-deserved reputation for being solitary creatures. The crucial distinction lies between the creative and the performing arts. Those who perform are more apt to enjoy professional camaraderie, and to require logistical and, therefore, also social support; while those who create are more apt to crave quietude, and thus, to cultivate solitude. Some exceptionally creative souls are also prone to antisocial eccentricities, if not downright social dysfunctionalities. Quite a number of philosophers appear to pride themselves on being eccentric if not socially dysfunctional, as though that alone were a guarantee of noetic profundity. The reconception of philosophy as a group activity also cuts somewhat across the gradient of psychology with groups that became full-blown in the 1960s as “group therapy,” and whose practices as well as residues are still current in both popular conception and corporate culture. However, there is a big difference between sitting in a circle holding hands and sitting around a table linking minds.

Recognition Versus Regulation

The United States was founded generally on a repugnance for and rebellion against excessive governmental interference in the lives and livelihoods of private citizens. Today, the American commitment to individual liberty remains essentially unchanged. The US government has little or no concern for the health, education, and welfare of its citizens. Health care, higher education, and legal justice are merely commodities in America. The US government and the multinational corporations, which increasingly control these, are exclusively concerned with extracting as much income as possible in the form of overt and covert taxation from the lower and middle classes, short of bankrupting too many of them in a single year and thus fomenting economic instability or political discontent. The default state of American private affairs, and arguably its primal state, is, therefore, non-regulatory. The cutting edge of professional philosophical practice is counseling and this is the focus of the primary initiative toward legislative recognition.

Chapter 5 – Client Counseling

Publisher Summary This chapter deals with the reason that put philosophical practice “on the map” of American and global awareness. Philosophical counseling has been done intermittently or sporadically for centuries. It is lately being portrayed as something new, but that portrayal is inaccurate: it is really something quite ancient that has been rediscovered and is being reformulated in contemporary contexts. The cultural entities that compete and cooperate for survival and which undergo “descent with modification” are of two interacting kinds: symbolic structures and technological products i.e., symbols and tools. No ones DNA contains information about the myths to which he subscribes, the language he speaks, the customs he observes, or the instruments he uses. All these things are artefacts of cultural evolution and unlike DNA are not transmitted by any means internal to the organism.

Why Is Philosophy Regaining Popularity

Philosophy has enormous intrinsic worth; and is therefore, potentially, enormously popular. It may require a philosophical agent to catalyze the reaction that results in the actualization of the said potential. It is discussed that philosophy regaining popularity may be completely mistaken. There are sprinklings of academics in every discipline, not just in philosophy, who variously loath, abhor, and sneer at popularizations of their respective subjects matter. When some academic philosophers hear about the success of Plato Not Prozac, which (among other things) makes philosophy accessible to a very general readership, and which ah initio was designed for and aimed at the self-help market, they recoil in horror. Some academic philosophers believe that philosophy is an exclusive preserve of professors or scholars and not meant for the masses at all.

The Corporate Philosopher

Philosophy for organizations not only entails a modular application of counseling, facilitation, and consulting techniques; it also has potentially far-reaching ramifications in terms of realpolitik in the 21 st century. To recapitulate the overarching thesis of this chapter: from the ancient to the early modern world, philosophers and their writings were the tutors of choice to monarchs, crown princes, and popes, and therefore, exerted seminal influence on those who governed the political (and hence, at that time, every other) estate of man. As Aristotle conceived it, politics was the noblest art and it persisted until the very successes of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution renormalized it, for both good and ill. Homo politicus remained the same in substance, but he metamorphosed too often from a statesman to a politician, on an average from a ruler to a lawyer, in the main from an aristocrat to a bureaucrat, and, at worst, from an autocrat to a sociopath.

Is Philosophy a Way of Life

Philosophical traditions of antiquity were primarily concerned with ways of leading a good life, with understanding proper versus improper conduct of life, not only for the sake of solitary man but also for the sake of the family, the community, the state, and posterity in historical record and in the continuum of culture. Philosophy — as love of wisdom — meant inculcating and practicing virtues, identifying and eschewing vices, thinking thoughts and examining arguments for the sake of their applicability to life, and not only as inapplicable intellectual exercises that sharpen the blades of mind but sever none of lifes knotty problems. Is philosophy a way of life is discussed in the chapter. Philosophy is not necessarily a way of life for professors of philosophy, who are beset by the same assortment of human problems as everyone else, but whose inclination toward theoretical thinking and hypothetical reasoning does not dispose them to apply much of their philosophical expertise to the resolution or management of such problems.