We're all philosophers
We all sometimes ask ourselves life’s big questions …
What is the nature of this world we inhabit?
What must we do to truly live well?
How can we be sure?
Such questions can feel all-important, for the significance of all our beliefs and all our actions depends on the answers we settle on.
In Search of Clarity
I’ve been obsessed with philosophical questions since I was a teenager.
I didn’t find the clarity I was looking for in academic philosophy. All the publishing of papers and writing of books just adds layer upon layer of complexity to a body of theory that few people find useful.
The world over, there are people eager to live purposefully, and ethically, but very few find academic philosophy helpful in knowing what this means in practice.
So I‘ve developed an alternative approach. I‘ve built upon the work of philosophers, such as Hume and Wittgenstein, and drawn upon perspectives from contemporary science, and the arts. While I was working towards the philosophical clarity that I felt was needed, I earned a living in leadership development and coaching. I saw the challenges, doubts, and dilemmas that people commonly face. So I became determined to make my approach a good fit for the shape of life as people actually experience it.
The New Approach
There are two key elements to my approach
The Givens
My starting point was an acknowledgment of the givens of the human condition.
Reality is what it is.
Overcoming Problems
My mission was to find a way to see the territory of philosophy that overcomes all sense of the philosophically problematic.
Philosophy Becoming Useful
Philosophical clarity is important in itself.
It gains additional value, however, from how it can help people think clearly and fulfil their potential to live well.
Escaping Illusion
Since we think using ideas, we tend to see our ideas projected out into the world. It is easy to mistake these projections for reality itself.
Philosophy can help us escape this trap and enter a healthy relationship with the fullness of reality.
Living Well
It turns out that there’s no single recipe for living well and that, for us to fulfil our potential to live well, we must investigate what living well means in the specific contexts of our own lives.
Philosophy can show what such investigations should look like.