A Companion to Public Philosophy

29Philosophical Counseling

LOU MARINOFF

1 Philosophical Counseling as a Mode of Philosophical Practice

Philosophical counseling is an educational activity in which philosophers engage in dialogue with clients who wish to address questions or manage problems that arise during the course of everyday life. Naturally, for philosophical counseling to be justifiable and its clients suitable, their questions must be amenable to philosophical inquiry, and their problems manageable if not resolvable by the application of philosophical insights, systems, or methods. Before offering examples of clients' issues and philosophical counselors' ways of addressing them, it might be helpful to contextualize philosophical counseling within the broader field of philosophical practice.

Like medical or legal practice, philosophical practice is an umbrella term for a profession that includes many kinds and clusters of service providers. That said, medical school is the common denominator in the definitive education of physicians, law school in the definitive education of lawyers, and graduate school in philosophy is the necessary but insufficient education of philosophical practitioners. Each of these schools provides a theoretical foundation for its respective future service providers. Graduates of medical and law schools are deployed into well‐established pathways of professional internship, where they hone their skills and develop their specializations. By contrast, graduates of academic philosophy ...