 And now I will introduce Luis de Miranda. Luis is an international philosopher and author of non-fiction and fiction. His books, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, or his novel, Cook in the Poet, has been translated into 10 languages. Bing and Neoness was published by MIT Press in 2019, and ensembled by Edinburgh University Press in 2020. Luis de Miranda is an affiliate researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Sweden. There he initiated the Queer Group, which is a cross-disciplinary research on effectual anticipation. And from January 2021, Luis will move to Sala University to do research on teaching at the new Center of Medical Humanities in the Department of History of Sciences and Ideas. And we wish him the best of luck in this new challenge. Luis, thank you very much for joining us today. You have the floor. Thank you. So I'll try to start with reminding us that we are celebrating philosophy, which is sometimes considered as something old. And in fact, philosophy is new. And I would even say that it's twice new. It is new because if we look at the evolution of life and the evolution of humanity, it is not so long ago that we have reached this paradigm in which we are capable of thinking about the whole in ways that can be shared, evaluated, discussed, and not only in terms of faith or dogma. But more interestingly for our question of health, I think that philosophy is new in the sense that there is something that can be called philosophical health. And this is what I will try to do in the next 15 minutes is explain what do I mean by philosophical health. We usually know what is physical health. We know what is mental health. At least there is, although there are many debates about it, there is a field, there is an institutional field called mental health. But when we go back in time, not so long ago, in fact, both physical health and psychological health were a luxury for the happy few at the beginning of the 20th century. Very few people had access to psychoanalysis, for example, or to systematic training of the body or diet. And my view is that philosophical health, which has been, since the Asian Greeks, a privilege for the happy few can be now democratized. And hopefully by the end of this century, we might engage with the idea of philosophical health in a way that is beneficial for the entire society globally. So the contribution I'd like to make is to present what I think are five values representative of philosophical health or five ideals. And the first one is mental heroism. And you will see that everything, these five principles are in fact known since the Asian Greeks. And I will be following here several analysis that have been presented first and foremost by Pierre Adour in his rereading of philosophy as a way of life rather than a pure abstract ivory tower in David. And also Foucault in his studies of the care of the self or of the soul. So indeed, it takes extreme courage to think as independently as possible. And this has been a thread all over the history of philosophy. We find it not only with the Greeks, the Asian Greeks, but also with Kant who proposed actually three maxims in his anthropology for practical wisdom, what you call practical wisdom. And those maxims are think for yourself, think into the place of the other in communication with human beings and always think consistently with yourself. So here we see already that mental heroism is not only about being able to resist resiliently the influences of the opinion, the fears, the collective fears of which we do have an example today for example. It is also being capable of intellectual empathy which is something quite different from emotional empathy. But more importantly, mental heroism is about a coherence between what we think, our beliefs, our system of values, our worldview and what we do. And in this sense, it is not only a world of ideals, but it has to do with orientation in life. And that's the second principle, deep orientation. It's not only about having courage, it is also about discovering what is our path, what is our way and trying to be faithful to our highest values where those values may be a truth, honesty or justice, for example. And what philosophy has been arguing since the ancient Greeks is that when we follow a deep orientation which starts with ideation indeed, it has an incidence into our social life, into reality. There is a correspondence between ideas and acts and ideas are social forces. Therefore, our ideas are embedded in a network of responsibility. So of course, this is closely tied to the notions of human flourishing by which individuals aspire to free themselves from uncontrolled beliefs, automatic fears, bellicose impulses, dogmas, or lack of mastery over their personal destination. Now, this has to do with the fact that philosophy is ideally not dogmatic in the sense that it doesn't pretend to know what the truth here and the figure here, of course, is socrates. It is philosophy, it is a love of wisdom as an ideal that is a dialectic ideal, that is an idea that allows for creativity and critique, respectful critique. And that's the third principle, critical creativity. So here it's important because in critical, we have the Greek root crisis, crisis. And I was born in 71 and since then, I've always heard that we've been in crisis. So for my generation, it's just crisis after crisis, according, of course, to the media or other mainstream readings. But we have forgotten that crisis, crisis in Greek doesn't mean crisis in the sense that we have it now, catastrophe. It means judgment, it means the capacity to discriminate from wanted elements from unwanted material. And it was used by doctors actually in the medical realm in order to designate the moment, the critical moment where a condition might evolve for better or worse. And why do I connect critique with creativity? Well, because the ideal of philosophical health suggests a durably resilient and regular capacity for recreative transformations of critical situations. And in physiology, for example, today, some researchers are talking about not only homeostasis, this sort of equilibrium to which a body would return, but about hypostasis, about the capacity to create new equilibriums. And we see that in life. And of course, we see that in mind. It is possible for our societies and for our being in the world to create new equilibriums and not always to come back conservatively to old ways. The force principle, which is of course, articulated with the others, there is no sense that the first was higher than the force. It's like a circle of capacities is what I call deep listening. And this seems quite self-evident. And yet we do it so rarely. Philosophy again, since the beginning has been concerned with dialogue and being consonant with the other with nature and with truth. And that's Kant's second principle, the capacity not only to hold to our truth, but also to have intellectual empathy for other possible truth in a context where Philo is more important than Sophie. Friendship in interrogating the world is more important than affirming one dogma over another. And when we speak of listening, of course, here comes the concept that we touched upon in the questions previously, the idea of the unheard of, the openness to hear the singularity not only of each human being, but also of life itself. Careful listening bears fruits because everything in the universe is interlaced. And that's not a dogma that's the very logical position of philosophy. Philosophy is the interrogation of the whole. Philosophy more precisely is the care for the whole. In everything that we do, do we care for the whole? We get sometimes so focused in producing money or producing a specific, very detailed kind of technology. And we forget the whole. And I think one of the aspects of, I think the positive aspect of what is happening this year is that suddenly we think of the whole. Of course, we think of the whole sometimes in a reduced manner, we think of our nation. Some people go further, they think about the world and some people may even go further and have a cosmological care of the whole. And that vigilance, again, that dislistening was also present in ancient philosophy in terms of vigilance and presence of mind and care for what they called physis which was nature in the sense that nature is absolute possibility. And that's the fifth principle and last principle, absolute possibility. So by absolute possibility, of course, it is not meant this technological neoliberal idea that technology will solve everything that the sky is the limit. In terms of philosophical health, absolute possibility is an a priori, intuitive feeling that the source of being what Aristotle's called primum mobile and what Plotinus called the one, that is absolute possibility that gets actualized in a matter or another locally. And the ways we actualize absolute possibility in co-creation with life, those ways are always contingent. And there, of course, that's where philosophy touches the political. There is not a necessary way of making a world. There are many ways of making a world. And we can interrogate, therefore, through critical creativity the way our world is now made. Right, so I will finish and conclude by saying that philosophy is a care for the whole in the sense that that whole is a creative flux. And in that sense, while we often hear the injunction to get real as if realism was the way history has been evolving, it is not. History is, all the progresses in history are not made by realist people. They are made by what I would call creolist people, people who actually prefer to get creol, people who never forget the impossible, the unheard of and people who are sometimes castigated and criticized for looking at that impossible and desiring it to become real while the realists are telling them, no, look at the numbers, look at the statistics and look at all the ratification that we are presenting as necessary and which as we have seen is not. So I'll conclude by that. I think that philosophers who are a group that is expanding, of course, there's no privilege to think, but they are a new aspect of being in the world. And in that sense, we can all start to practice more so that we have in the past, philosophical health as something that will come as a compliment to physical health and psychological health. With the audio. Okay. Thank you very much, Luis. Thank you, really. For your excellent and critical thoughts, you went directly to the essential point, I think, and it was great and brilliant. Thank you again for your profound and meaningful speech. Now I'd like to invite the audience to make their comments and questions to our speaker. And also I may invite the other speakers to ask questions. You can ask questions each other between you. Thank you, Luis. We have one question from Russia, the first one. First, Sophia is thanking you. She says for food and for thought and called to mental action. And she's asking if are not the principles that you have suggested, kind of intellectual virtues first outlined by Aristoteles now being revised. Exactly, and I mentioned so. I wouldn't say Aristoteles only. I would say that from Plato to the Stoics, and of course, Aristoteles, there is much in ancient philosophy that, as I said, has not yet been actualized in society yet. It is still considered as something that it's nice, it's a nice training for the mind, but, and of course they are attempts to apply it more so in the last 20 years. But I think that the project is still open for society to integrate philosophical health. When I started studying philosophy, it was actually considered almost a disease to study philosophy in the early 90s. My God, you will be out of a job. You are totally disconnected from real life. All the cliches about philosophy. And I think this is starting to slowly change now, but the biggest changes are ahead of us. And for example, one of the practices I have along with my research is that I do philosophical counseling with individuals and I help them reflect about the worldview and engagement in life. And I think we could generalize this practice of philosophical care in many aspects of life. I am studying, for example, to work with a doctor who is a specialist in spinal cord injury. And we have the individuals who are suddenly, their life is transformed in the sense that suddenly their domain of possibilities in terms of moving is extremely reduced. Yet their mind is functioning perfectly. So they have to redefine their life. And the way of doing it is through philosophical care. Thank you very much. We have another question. Well, he's thanking you and he's asking just a question on one of our last points of your very last point, sorry. Could we imagine a Niste without its his illness? That's a very interesting question. And indeed, Niste had that concept of great health, which is somehow related with some of the principles I've been exposing. I think despite the romanticism about the fact that it is through overcoming his condition, continuous headaches and other forms of impairment that Niste had, there is this romantic view that he was a great thinker because he could overcome that. And in a way, if he didn't have that impairments, perhaps he would have simply have been a little bit more lazy. In life, in existence, it's true that sometimes, and coming back to the conversations I have regarding patients who have spinal cord injury, it is true that sometimes it is through an accident that we wake up from a form of life that might have been immature. And now what philosophical health would do is that precisely, we don't need to have an accident or to get as sick as Niste had to be philosophically healthy. It can be something that can be democratized and developed by anticipation, right? I know there is this cliche about philosophizing as something that we do when everything goes wrong. And I would like philosophizing to be something that we do also as everything goes well. Thank you very much, Luis. We have a question from Pedro Gomez. He says, truth isn't always be, isn't always be, sorry, a major scope of philosophy and not the fear, disgust, disgust under a pseudo value under a false pandemic? Right. I mean, I haven't read the question, but I think I understand that he means there that there is a consensus today on the pandemic. And indeed, philosophers are very suspicious of, actually, I was going to say, there are suspicious of pandemics. Well, there are suspicious of consensus because consensus itself is the biggest pandemic. The contagion of ideas is the first pandemic and this has been going on forever. So it would be interesting. And I lived in Sweden, I live in Sweden and I thought that was the way Sweden was following. It is to give people the responsibility rather than impose biopolitics and authoritarian rules on them. And I thought this was very healthy. Unfortunately, Sweden has been pressured by the dominant opinion, which is very anxiogeogenic and is now introducing itself more stringent rules which are still not obligatory, right? But I think that indeed, philosophical health would allow people collectively to be less controlled by their fears ideologies or means of interpretation that might prevent the freedom of thought. Thank you very much, Luis. Another question from Sophia from Russia. First of all, she's thanking you for the answer and she has another question. What makes you so optimistic about spreading this philosophical health in the population? The modern world actually resists this. It is true that sometimes we may have the impression that we live in an anti-intellectual world where emotionalism dominates. Yet through my practice of philosophical counseling, I have discovered through my great gratitude that much more of us than we think are willing to consider that to think is as important as it is to breathe. And the traditional separation that we made, for example, between emotions and thinking is fallacious. I mean, we know that thinking is also a feeling through intuition, for example. So I'm optimistic because I've experienced in my life that every time that I have applied those principles, although I might have done it in a way that was not as explicit as now, but it was worth it. So to all the people who are philosophically oriented and sometimes might fall into some despair that my God, this world is really anti-intellectual and sometimes it feels like intellectuals are the persecuted minority over which we talk the less. To these people, I would say it's worth it. It's worth it because it's healthy and that balance between physical, psychological and philosophical health is the way to go. I like your optimism and I admire it. I have to say it, thank you very much. And here we have a question from Jim Pong. Could Luis, could you please explain a bit more about the relation between the absolute possibility and Aristotle concept of the one? Right. So the concept of the one is more present in Plotinus and Plato. So I would like to say two things. The first thing is that I made a longer lecture yesterday about the principles and I will share the link now to the attendees since it's online. I've also written about that concept of absolute possibility which I call the creel for short in the sense that we often speak about the real but since this real as primum mobility here to use an expression by Aristotle as a first principle or whether we think it is true or not where it can be an ethical principle. It is pure multiplicity. However, and this I will not develop too much but it's important to say that this, the question of the multiple and the one was very important for the Greeks. Is this idea that on the one hand, yes, we realize that nature, physics, the creel, absolute possibility, it is infinitely multiple but precisely from a logical point of view, whenever you posit the infinite multiple, you posit the other side of the coin, which is the one. So that's the relationship. And of course, I would take an entire lecture to enter into the relationships between the multiple and the one but it is not a question for sophistic, it is a very political and present question. Of course, how do we have a world that is coherent, united and yet diverse? And that's what the Greeks were already thinking. Perfect. We have a question from Helen Salman. She's asking, today, are health decisions made more a function of medical advances or of society's vision of health? I mean, of course, we know that these decisions are enmeshed in a network of ideological, political, national reasons and also biomedical reasons. In the sense that, for example, they might rely on statistics. One of the things that philosophy has been saying in the last decade is that we are dangerously becoming a world and that's related to what I said about realism. We are becoming a world in which numbers are the ultimate element for decision, sometimes presented candidly and sometimes presented ideologically as manipulation. It is almost as if, from the point of view of philosophical health, we have, this world, the current world should be diagnosed with arithmomania, which is in fact the disease, the disease of counting everything, the disease of thinking that if we have the numbers, if we have the statistics, if we can demonstrate with graphs, then we are going to take a right decision. And this reminds me of what Hegel said in his time. So in his time, there was this, the pseudo science of phrenology, which looked at the brain and the size of the skull, et cetera, to infer discourse about the character of people. Are they going to be criminal or not? And Hegel said, well, and this is valid for artificial intelligence today, for example, or for all the analytics and the based on numbers. He said, well, even if, and he didn't believe in phrenology, but even if phrenology was right at an instant A, this sort of inference based on data, well, the human being will take a decision tomorrow or now that we'll totally change and reshuffle this conclusions, this ratification of what we think is happening. So I think it's, we can transpose it today. I think that analytic thinking has to be rebalanced, not only with dialectic thinking, but also what I call Creolelectic thinking, which is related to this idea of philosophical health. And there again, I've written about that and I don't think I have time here to expose the details. Thank you very much, Louis. And thanks for all your explanations, your all your answers, which were really clarified. And now we have to move on. Yes. So I would like to read a brief part of a talk I gave actually at UNESCO last year, where I was launching the idea of philosophical health. And this is taken from the movement I'm fostering that you can join in the on the side, philosophical.health. So I'm quoting myself, which is not very humble, but philosophical health will be in the 21st century, what physical and psychological health were in the 20th century. At the beginning of the century, it is a luxury for the happy few. By the end of the century, it is a necessity for all. Philosophical health is a state of fruitful coherence between a person's way of thinking and speaking and their ways of acting, such that the possibilities for a good life are increased and the needs for self and intersubjective flourishing satisfy. A philosophically healthy individual group or system or protocol ensures that the goals and purposes of the whole are programmatically aligned with its highest ideals while respecting the sustainable, plural, and creole future of the parties concern by the processes at stake. Thank you.