Philosophical Health for All: A Practical Introduction

Description

Are you philosophically healthy? Do your actions reflect your thoughts, do your words mirror your values, or do you live in contradiction with and ignorance of your deepest values, beliefs and of your implicit worldview? This first introduction to the new field of philosophical health, written by its forerunner, Luis de Miranda, explores the 6 elements of the discipline, including the senses of body, self, belonging, possibility, purpose, and the philosophical sense. Explaining step by step how a reflexive practice of sense-making can create a holistic and dynamic harmony between these six existential senses, Miranda weaves here a pragmatic system around the six corresponding active qualities: intuition (the truth of the body), honesty (the truth of the person); joy (the truth of relationship); creation (the truth of the Real); freedom (the truth of destiny); and meaning, the truth of philosophy. Each chapter will be placed in conversation with a specific modern philosopher who is relevant to understanding what is at stake: Bergson for embodied intuition, Descartes for self-honesty, Spinoza for well-belonging, in order to make existential stances explicit, thus more relevant and actionable in practice. Featuring working examples of how to achieve philosophical health, this book is a useful and practical guide for the practice of philosophical health and any discipline that deals – or should deal – with meaning, it is also a sober toolkit for any aspiring healthy mind in a healthy body. Philosophical health is not only about self-help or self-development: it is a needed response to current mindless processes in globalisation if we are to build a harmonious and caring planetary civilisation.