Philosophical Health : Thinking As a Way of Healing

Bringing together leading international and interdisciplinary scholars, this ground-breaking volume examines the theory and practice of philosophical health in contemporary contexts of care broadly understood, care for the self, care for the other, and care for the world. But what do we mean by philosophical health? Whilst this book does not seek to provide a normative definition, as it explores disparate perspectives and encourages pluralism in philosophical ways of life, one may envision philosophical health as a state of creative coherence between a person’s or a group’s way of thinking and their way of acting, such that the possibilities for a good life are increased, and the needs for flourishing satisfied. An idea central to philosophical health is the concept of ‘possibility'. Without a sense of self-possibility and openness to the future, health loses meaning, and conversely, pathologies are defined by various kinds of impossibilities. As such, philosophical health reconsiders care as a process of cultivating or pruning the compossible in embodied, psychological, and social terms, of allowing things to re-generate, or in some cases to vanish. Drawing on the history of philosophy, phenomenology, new materialism, post-colonialism but also a wide range of contemporary approaches to philosophical practice, Philosophical Health sheds light on the understudied philosophical dimension of care and the healing dimension of philosophizing. Advocating philosophy as a lived practice, it uncovers the increasing relevance of philosophical health to contemporary debates on well-being, well-belonging, counselling, and development.

Luis de Miranda is Senior Researcher in Practical Philosophy at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, Finland, and an Affiliated Researcher at the House of Innovation of the Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. He is a philosophical counsellor and the founder of the Philosophical Health International movement. He edited the anthology Philosophical Health (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Keith Ansell Pearson holds a Personal Chair in Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. He is the author of acclaimed monographs on Nietzsche and Bergson and has published a number of essays on Guyau's ethics.

Michael Ure is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, Australia. He is author of Nietzsche's Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works (2008) and Nietzsche's 'The Gay Science' (2018) and co-editor of The Politics of Compassion (2014)

Daniel Conway is Professor and Head of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University, USA, having previously held faculty appointments at Pennsylvania State University, Stanford and Harvard.