The 6 Elements of Philosophical Health
Channel: Dr Luis de Miranda
Date: 2022-04-30

This is a very short presentation of the methodology for philosophical health developed by Dr Luis de Miranda in his Sense-Making Interviews Looking at the 6 Elements of Philosophical Health.

Philosophical health, as defined by Luis de Miranda, refers to a state of fruitful coherence between a person's ways of thinking and speaking and their ways of acting. This coherence contributes to both individual and collective good, ultimately leading to a flourishing life.

Beyond grounding this new methodology theoretically (a work that is started here but will in the future necessitate several developments), the main motivation here is pragmatic: to provide the recent philosophical health movement with a testable method and show that philosophically-oriented interviews are possible in a manner that can be reproduced, compared, tested and used systematically with a population that has received no training in philosophy. The SMILE_PH approach was conceived by the author during an ethically approved pilot study focused on the philosophy of life of persons living with spinal cord injury (SCI), with the intention of rectifying the epistemic obstacles generated by rationalist, Socratic or unstructured ways of in-depth interviewing. The six-step structure of the method is also inspired by hundreds of individual dialogue sessions with philosophical counselees, led by the author between 2018 and 2022: the SMILE_PH method progressively gathers phenomenological data about 1 – our bodily sense, 2 – our sense of self, 3 – our sense of belonging, 4 – our sense of the possible, 5 – our sense of purpose and 6 – our philosophical sense.

More information here:
https://philosophicalparlour.com
https://philosophical.health
https://luisdemiranda.com