“Socrates neither set out benches for
his students, nor sat on a platform, nor set hours for his lectures.
He was philosophizing all the time—while he was joking, while he
was drinking, while he was soldiering, whenever he met you on the
street, and at the end when he was in prison and drinking the poison.
He was the first to show that all your life, all the time, in
everything you do, whatever you are doing, is the time for
philosophy.” -Plutarch
Jung observed that "philosophy is
no longer a way of life as it was in antiquity; it has turned into an
exclusively intellectual and academic affair." The Gnosis
Institute will strive to reverse this course with a focus on Living
Philosophy.
The Living Philosophy Program will be a
different Philosophy program, one that is focused on using philosophy
as a vital tool for living. The Philosophy Programs in Academia might
more accurately be referred to as “philosophology,” or the study
of philosophy, rather than the practice of philosophy. The American
Philosophical Practitioners Association compares the difference to
that of studying paintings and actually painting. While the study of
paintings is an important part of an artist's education, it would be
very strange to think that it was the whole of it.
The Gnosis Institute will not attempt
to out-do large universities in the standard model of academic
philosophy education, instead the Living Philosophy Program is
focused on the practice of philosophy in our lives. Training
professional Philosophy practitioners for such roles as:
Philosophical Counseling, Philosophical Consulting, and Philosophical
Analysis on many levels. Seeking guidance from a Philosophy
practitioner as an individual, and as an organization is often a
better fit than seeking guidance from the current standard sources.
The most important task of this
program, however, is to train philosophers to engage in public
discourse. In a world where a fallacy is most often given as an
argument, and an insult as a conclusion, we need engaged public
philosophers more than ever.
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