 Thank you and welcome. So today we will be talking and hopefully having a dialogue, not just a monologue, about this book called Philosophical Help. As you can see from the cover, the first thing that we noticed is that there is not enough space to write philosophical, right? So they had to cut philosophy in two. And I think that's a nice metaphor for the world we live in. There's not enough space sometimes we feel for philosophy in our lives, in our profession, in our practice. And I think that's not a good thing. I think philosophy from the beginning was thought as something that helps us in our practices, in our ways of life, and not just an exercise of contemplation, which it also is, of course. So that would be the first definition of philosophical health that I would give. It is about the attunement, the coherence, the resonance between our thoughts, our values, our worldview, and our actions, our practices, the way we do what we do. Now, a question that might arise is, why health? Of course, most of you remember the Greek expression, healthy mind in a healthy body, or sometimes the opposite, or the other way around healthy body with a healthy mind. So I think the Greeks who are sometimes considered as the inventors or discoverers of Western philosophy, because there are different kinds of ways of knowing that we could call philosophy across the world. But for the Greeks, this aspect of health was very important. But of course, by combining these two words, we're already qualifying them. Health qualifies philosophy as something that is active in the way we embody the world. But philosophy qualifies health in the sense that, well, we are probably not simply talking about physical health, and we are not simply talking about psychological health. And you know these two constructs. Imagine we were in the early 18th century, and we would be in the library, much like this one. And I would be perhaps lecturing on physical health. And that would be really new. If I say physical health for all in the early 18th century, that would be a new idea. Why? Because the idea of practicing gymnastics, for example, for the sake of a healthier body in itself, was the privilege of an elite, aristocratic elite. Imagine now that we are in the same library, 100 years later, early 19th century, and I'll be lecturing about psychological health. And that would be also a new idea. Psychological health for all. Well, because psychology was more or less invented as an approach as a scientist at the end of the 18th century. But also because it was in the beginning this idea of psychological health, it was the privilege of some happy few. Or if you prefer unhappy few, if we are thinking about, for example, the people who visited Freud were not always the most joyful people, we could know. And here I am. 100 years later, here I'm traveling. That's one of the privileges. If you read this book, you'll be able to travel in time, speaking to you about philosophical health for all. And that's a new idea. That's a new idea because just as physical health for all in the early 18th century and psychological health for all in the early 19th century. Today, we might think and we might argue that philosophical health is still the privilege of certain happy few. Why? Well, the reasons can be economical. The reasons can be political. Let's say they are political, for example. We are in Finland. Can anyone tell me at what age humans, born in Finland, officially discover philosophy in school, if they do? In France, a country that is reputed for being philosophical, it is only in the last year of the high school, a gymnasium, that people discover philosophy. I would assume it's more or less the same here. So that's a political reason why philosophical health is for an elite. Because the government don't find it necessary or important to tell human beings in the first 20 years that there's something called philosophy that might be useful, for example, to not only think critically but think in concepts. And this is very important, why? Because I would argue that we live in a very emotional society, anti-intellectualist. And we live in a society that has been known for being polarized. And polarization goes a lot with an emotional treatment of reality rather than conceptual treatment. You would tell me, yes, but philosophers, they use concepts and they are arguing all the time. Perhaps, I think, they are arguing in a polite way, I would say, if not always, but most of the time. The other reason why I think philosophical health is still a new idea is that philosophy still has that reputation of being a practice that is not useful, a practice that even is suspect of being indulged upon by people who are qualified as losers in a society that tends to separate humans between winners and losers. So when I decided to study philosophy when I was my 18-year-old, 90s, or 20, people thought that there must be something wrong with me. If you want to study philosophy, you have a mental issue. I always discovered philosophy as a discipline quite late, as a matter of fact. And it immediately enchanted me as being something very practical, in fact, as something that helps us engage in the world meaningfully, especially in a time where we are submerged by choices. So you could say, OK, maybe 400 years ago, with all the social determinism and perhaps less entertainment and technologies and comfort, the problem was not so much about choosing a life, but rather accepting or not the life that was somehow written very often for us in most social classes. But today I see a lot of, as a philosophical practitioner and counselor, I see a lot of young people come to me and less young. And they feel that they have too many choices. And sometimes at 40 or 45 or 50, people are still keeping the choices in the air because they are potentials and thinking, well, in fact, I can still be this, be that, or people think of themselves in terms of status, in terms of possibilities that would necessarily be actualized if simply they wanted. So another reason why I think philosophical health is a new idea, but I would then argue that it's a new old idea, of course. It's because we are living now in the extremes. So we were talking about COVID, a few minutes before I started. And after COVID, like after a war, et cetera, people say, OK, now maybe we can go back to normal. But I think there is no return to normal. I think that we have entered a moment of the human and the Earth history where we now live in the extreme. And is that bad? Well, for some, for example, ecological reasons, that's worrying. But I would argue that actually living in the extreme is the very essence of life that we had forgotten in times of comfort, in times of sleepwalking. This is a very Nietzschean idea. And this is how I decided to call this new field. And again, it's an old field because that's what Greek philosophy and Roman philosophy was about. And I think many wisdom practices in the world consider philosophy or the questioning of the ultimate truth as something that has a function, a social function. But I call it health remembering my dear philosopher Nietzsche, who was dear to me when I was a teenager, like many teenagers. So as you can see, it's a little bit of a cliche, right? But Nietzsche is an important figure when he discovered philosophy because he has this freedom of thinking. He has also the capacity to interrogate concepts that seem familiar and give them another shape. And so Nietzsche had this idea of the great health. And for him, the great health was this capacity to live in the extremes and yet do it joyfully, do it meaningfully, and be still a world-former. Of course, we need worlds, we need societies, we need to have rules, but in a way that is ever created and that is always questioning the rigidity that we might fall into, the dogmas that we might fall into. And so Nietzschean actually, the German language has this term, full kraftischkeit, which is modern health. It's, in English, would say, hailness perhaps or vigor. And so they had these three moments. Yes, we can be sick and ill. And then in the middle, when we are OK, we're healthy. But the real state that Nietzsche, but even Leibniz before, and I speak about Leibniz later, we're thinking of is this great health where we are in the full capacity of our domain of possibility and our capacity to create the best possible life, not only for us, but for the others that shared the world we're living in. In French, il en, yes, so that's an interesting word in French, il en vitale. And I think you're right. I think in French, it would be the il en. Yeah, that's very well put. And that reminds us of Berkson's philosophy. Berkson is not so well known today on he Berkson. He had a Nobel Prize. He was the superstar of philosophy 100 years ago. And he had this view, very Nietzschean also, that at the source of life, there is this ever going creation of infinite possibilities. And what we do as humans, we don't create much. There is this superabundance is there, often invisible. But what we do is that we shape, we tailor, and we sort of give rules to this profusion. And that is called intelligence for Berkson. And the problem is that after a while, we think that these labels and these ways of cutting reality into certain shapes, we think that's reality itself. And we forget that we have named it. We have divided such way, but we could have done it in another way. So the subtitle of this book is Thinking as a Way of Healing. And that's a little bit provocative because some people might read it as borderline new ageing. But we don't need to go that far in the sense that we know, for example, when there is a natural catastrophe. We know that after that, for example, I don't know, Hurricane Katrina or even COVID, after that and during that, people engage much more in meaning making, in sense making, in this sort of cooperation that sometimes is forgotten in times of comfort. In trying to take the possibles that are still there, which might be covered by fear or panic or simply catastrophe itself, and rearrange them and see, well, we can still make a world with the resources we have. So this is very, I think, important today because we observe. We were talking about, for example, young people, teenagers. We observe today that there is a crisis of motivation among many teenagers who are in high school. They are given all the possibilities. We're talking, for example, we don't need to go very far. We're talking about the Nordics, for example, where we live. Teachers have a very hard time getting teenagers to be motivated. And sometimes we wonder why. And I've been discussing this, and I'm working with a school called Philosophiska, who has the courage to teach philosophy along with a normal program from kindergarten. And they told me the very same thing. They said, I think most teenagers are not motivated because they don't see meaning. They don't see a higher purpose in this world. Some people say that we are the first civilization that doesn't have a shared cosmology. Unless you want to consider that making money as much money as possible by competing with my neighbor, if that's a cosmology, perhaps if you consider that the universe is in constant competition of parts between themselves, survival of the fetus. But even that is not shared. Adam Smith, with his invisible hand, wanted this view to be shared. But no. So we don't have really a shared cosmology. And I think that, in a way, I'm not advocating the universal dorm. I think diversity is good. And I think we are still exploring that today. We've been, let's say, until the French Revolution, very fascinated by oneness, represented sometimes by the king, and then the democratic experience, which is still very young, has been more and more fascinated by the idea of diversity and pluralism. And I think now we're realizing, well, we've gone too far in that because we've forgotten oneness. So I think now the challenge, and this is another challenge, I think, for a philosophically healthy society, is to rebuild oneness in diversity, to rebuild a shared cosmology. That, yes, respects the fact that there might be different worldviews, different ways of life, forms of life. But not to the point that we would believe that just having communities that are constantly yelling at themselves would sort of self-regulate. And there is a theory today called agonistic pluralism, or is it pluralistic agonism? I never know. But the idea is that we shouldn't try to have deliberation. We shouldn't try to have people dialogue with each other from different epistemic tribes, communities of knowledge. We should simply let them yell at each other, and that's democracy because it's actually good because then no one group will take over. And that's Chantal Mouff, who is a French-Belgian philosopher who famously proposed that idea that we should simply favor that agonism between communities without trying to create a sort of meta discourse that would rationalize all that or propose some form of universal consensus or agreement. The problem is that Chantal Mouff, M-O-U-F-E. And the problem with that is that, well, I think that's sort of a socialist or post-modern version of what Adam Smith already said, like the invisible hand applied to communities. And the discourse that comes with that is very often that and the media are very good at that, saying that, oh, they're good communities and they're bad communities. They're the nice communities. They're so cute. And I'm not going to name drop. I know you wanted to do that. I won't. And then they're the bad communities. I think this is naive. I think that by definition, and I wrote another book called Ensemblance about the intellectual history of Esprit de Corp about this loyalty to groups from the 18th century to now. And one of the things I became very convinced of is that every community will tend to expand. Every group that has a strong belief, whatever it is, will have a natural tendency to think that everyone should be like them. And there's no exception to that. There's no nice community that, of course, there are some people that are a little bit more violent than others. But at the end of the day, that's what Esprit de Corp is, is trying to, is having such faith in what we believe in that community that we actually think that's normal. And those who are against against them, those who are outside, they just don't understand. It's normal to be this or that or that. So this is why I think philosophical health has that hint of universalism that has not been very popular, let's say, in the last decades of postmodernism. But I think, inevitably, that's what we do. We universalize all the time. That's what I meant by communities expanding, is that they tend to apply their categories in universalizing terms. And that's because this is how we think to think. And I think to philosophize is, of course, seeing differences. But it's trying to think about the whole. Philosophy is the care of the whole. It's a very simple definition that I proposed. It allows us to distinguish between philosophy and other practices who care for a part of the world. Medicine cares for a part, which is our body. Engineering cares for another part. This building thing, machine. Philosophy is the care for the whole. And therefore, it is sometimes mocked as being very in-productive with the parts. But someone needs to care for the whole. And what happens is that today, because we've become global and because we have this global crisis, famous climate crisis, but also, I think, a political crisis of lack of shared cosmology, I think the care for the whole becomes something actually very important in practical terms. Now, to do justice to this book, I should say it's an anthology. So I gathered people from different traditions, academic traditions, but also geographical locations. And I asked them to tap into their own knowledge and practices and research to see what would it mean in terms of philosophical help. I had a few articles published that they had something to build upon. But I was surprised to see that the frame that I proposed, and I can tell you more about that, for example, according to me, the five principles of philosophical health. But let's say this very general frame of ad-equation between our practices and our concepts and this care for the whole was inspiring really a real interdisciplinary conversation. So this is where I rest a bit from my improvisation by giving you an idea of what kind of chapters we have. However, I'm happy to make a pause here if you have questions or comments regarding this first part of my talk. Otherwise, I'll give you an idea of the contents of the book. So the book is divided in three parts, the self, the others, and the world. And so in itself, that's part of the manifesto, because I do think that philosophical health is not only about self-development. So this is not stoicism. I build this sort of armor and distance from the world, which is, by the way, a very simplified version of stoicism. Stoicism is more rich and complex. But so the self is important. Of course, we want to cultivate ourselves. We want to perhaps even approach what the Greeks called theosis. It's becoming closer to divine principles. But we want also to be in the world with the others. Or even if we don't want, we have to, right? So as care for the others, philosophical health has something to say. And then, because we tend to be still today very anthropocentric in our explanation as a footnote here, I've been working a lot with computer scientists in the philosophy of artificial intelligence. And today, even at the level of the European politics, they consider it very progressive to say, oh, AI is going to be human-centric. Ooh, we are so modern and progressive. But human-centric, that's anthropocentrism. And we know, since the 40s, or even before, that it's not a good thing for the destiny of the earth to have anthropocentric practices. That's why the philosophy is about the world. And I think that a healthy view of our systems and the way we interact with different ecosystems needs not to be eco-centric, but perhaps Earth-centric, or as I write, Creel-centric. But Creel, for me, is the creative real. A little bit like Berkson had this, or Whitehead, or all process philosophers have this idea of creation at the source of everything there is, not as something that would be typically human. So the world is the third part of the book. And now let me go into the details of the chapters, give you just a brief idea of this first anthology, which is very explorative, right? That's the beautiful adventure of it, is that it is not necessarily a new idea. It's a philosophical help, but it's a new phrase. And we academics, we like phrases because they allow us to define a domain of possibility and then see, OK, what does that do in terms of conceptual engineering, but also in terms of possibilities of practices? And the book, The Part on the Self, opens with a chapter by Eugenia Gaulein, called, Living for Real, Not Counter-Fate, Self-Honesty, as a Foundation for Philosophical Help. So she's a psychologist, and she explores this idea of self-honesty and confronts it with some ideas that I proposed before on philosophical health. And she says, well, we have to start with being honest with ourself, which is not always easy, right? But at least it's something we can do with a certain economy of means. It's a little bit sort of an analogon to Descartes' cogito, right? I think therefore, Descartes said, OK. He said, OK, let's be honest with myself and try to reconsider philosophy from where I am with what I had, no books, no references, just trying to be honest with how things might appear. The second chapter by Léhal Balogh is called, Existential Phenomenological Approaches in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy to the Idea of Philosophical Help. So that's an important chapter of, say, intellectual history. So it looks at how in the psychotherapy practices some people, Viktor Frankl, for example, have tried to separate themselves from the tendency of the psychological approach to be very normative and very obsessed by measurements and to put back the person in the center. And so this is important because we see that there is a tendency in psychology, in psychological movements to start as a rediscovery of philosophy, Freud, for his famous division between the Eid, the ego, and the superego was actually very much inspired by Plato in various, not only the republic, but I think also the stimulus, the division of the soul between desire and knowledge, et cetera, and the news. I will not enter into that. But when we fast forward 50, 60 years, we see cognitive behavioral therapy with Ellis, I think Albert Ellis and he also rediscovered Greek philosophy, the stoics, et cetera, but very slowly also, like with psychoanalysis, over the decades, the approach becomes very normative. So separates itself from philosophy and wants to be a science. And then where we have is that we have practitioners who, when someone sits in front of them, instead of entering into deep listening, they are, they might be listening, but they are also, they have these grids that they want to apply that are given by their field. The third chapter is by Michael Loughlin. And so in terms of geography, Eugenia is in the States. Lehel is in Japan. Michael is in the UK. And he writes about mechanisms, organisms, and persons, philosophical health, and person-centered care. So as you can see, each of these articles, like, I mean, higher, preferably the author, could speak also for one hour. This is about how, in health care today, there are some attempts to take into consideration the singularity of the person. And for Michael, well, that's precisely what philosophical health can help us do. And of course, he explains in detail how and why. And I've worked with him, and I've worked in health care. And if time allows, I will explain how I have devised this semi-structure method that allows precisely that by speaking about the bodily sense, the sense of self, all the way to the philosophical sense to get to know or to help the person have a more explicit view of their philosophy of life. Does that mean that we all have a philosophy of life, a systematic view, a Hegel? No, but we can certainly progress in the clarification of why we do things and if we have a purpose, for example. And I mean by that, not just goals, but a real higher purpose, which doesn't need to be religious. Speaking of this border between, we were here more in the frontier between psychology and philosophy, right? Now, the next chapter is the border between religion and philosophy with a text by Balaganapathy Devarakonda from India, who writes about Samatha, or the state of equanimity at philosophical health, a perspective from the Bhagavad Gita. The chapter on the self, and this is interesting because we tried in a book to bring other views, other than Western. And we see that, in fact, philosophical health as an intention is practiced in many traditions. The last chapter of the part on the self is called Logical Constructivism in Philosophical Health by Eliot De Cohen. So Eliot De Cohen is one of the key figures of philosophical counseling in the USA. And he has a very logical base approach. He thinks that if we think more logically, we'll live better. And that's certainly one of the aspects of philosophical health because sometimes we carry huge contradictions that we don't even see, right? Let me give you an example. As someone kindly reaches for a glass of water, perhaps, the example would be the following. Thank you very much. If I want to endure another 40 minutes, I need to drink a bit of water. One day, as I told you, I'm a philosophical counselor, and so I help people make sense of their lives. And I have this man, 52 years old, Russian, who reaches to me and says, I feel lonely. And I feel lonely, and I would like to have a wife. I would like to have children, but I don't. And so here, he expresses a form of idealism. He speaks about love. Let's call it idealism, right? Not that I believe that love doesn't exist, but you will understand why I call it idealism. It's to contrast better with what he then tells me. He explains that, well, when he tries to seduce a woman, it's usually a married woman. And he thinks, anyway, women only are interested in rich guys who have a nice car and dress well. So we can say that this worldview is one that we could qualify as cynicism. And so here, I'm not even judging. I'm just comparing the two and saying, well, if someone carries both an idealist intention and a cynical intention, this is going to be a disaster. And of course, you're going to be lonely. So here, I'm not even judging. I told him, actually, I told him, well, either you go, you embody your idealism, and you really start believing in love. And therefore, you don't put yourself in relationships that you know by definition will deny that. Or if you want to be a cynic, be a coherent cynic. I don't know, buy a nice car, a second hand, one suit that looks great, and go ahead. But I'm not making fun of him, because we all like that, right? We all have this contradiction. I think this is what philosophy feels of course. Thank you very much. That was really kind. Tries to solve. So we enter now the second part of the book on the others. So I don't know if people still remember Jean-Paul Sartre used to be famous, right? And he famously said, well, hell is the others, or the others is the right. And of course, we can identify with that, right? But hell is supposed to be a place where you go after you die. But the others are here when you're alive. So it's perhaps even worse than hell, I don't know. But more seriously, I think that there is an importance in philosophical, health, and counseling philosophical care in helping us live together. And we'll talk more about that. But it starts with the others as humans, right? But then there are the others as animals, the others as ideas, the others as entities that we might or might not identify. But here, this part is more human. So for example, the first chapter by Laura McMahon is about the virtue of vulnerability. Merleau-Ponty and Minoukin on the boundaries of personal identity. And so here, we move slowly from the personal to the family as a sort of first group of interaction that allows us sometimes to analyze things better than if we think only in personal terms. Raja Rosenhagen follows with a chapter on philosophical health, nonviolent just communication, and epistemic justice. So you might have heard of this concept of epistemic injustice. One way of explaining it from within philosophical health is the following. When I conducted interviews with people living with spinal cord injury, I did this in two times. The first time, it was a sort of a phenomenological approach that was based on the intention to know if some kind of philosophy of life had helped these people thrive. Because I interviewed people who had a tetraplagic condition, who have a tetraplagic condition, but who have a good life. And their community identifies themselves as having a good life. So I was trying to find, well, maybe there is a reason that is not just willpower or some physical reason. Their body is 95% paralyzed. They have to reinvent themselves after the trauma. And by the way, they all had a very high sense of the possible. We'll come back to that. But what I meant here is that when I started the first set of interviews, I was very direct. I was like, OK, so what's the most important thing for you in life? What's your philosophy of life? And of course, there is some epistemic ingesting in talking to people like that. Because not everyone has the time or capacity to indulge in philosophical thinking. So people are a bit intimidated. It's a bit like taking people with a helicopter on top of Mount Everest. And then, of course, you might need to breathe. So then you go down. So I thought, OK, we need a way of talking about philosophical health with people. There is more gentle that goes progressively. And that's how I came up with the smile method. Smile pH, that's an acronym for sense-making interviews looking at elements of philosophical health. So if that's something that I apply now in my counseling, we would have a session where we talk about your bodily sense. And usually everyone can say something about their body and the progression in time of their perception of their body. Then we would talk about your sense of self. And this is semi-structured. So it's very open. You can take whatever you want, as long as you play the game of in that part speaking about the self. Then we move to the sense of belonging. And then, after that, the sense of the possible, which is, by the way, the way I define health philosophically, the sense of the possible. If you have a high sense of the possible, you're healthy. You might be 95% paralyzed. But if you have a high sense of the possible, then you're healthy. If you are filthy rich, and bored, and depressed, and cynical, and don't know what to do with your life, your life is empty, you are not healthy. Although you can do a lot with your money. After that comes, we would talk about the sense of purpose. And I would say this is where we enter the human sphere, sense of purpose, and then the philosophical sense, the worldview. Because I believe that we share the first four with all living beings. All living beings have some kind of bodily sense, of course, but even sense of self. A tree has a sense of the possible. If you block, it grows in a way, it will sense things such that it grows another way. So the importance of purpose is specifically human, I think. And the next chapter talks about that, about meaning. From a hermeneutic approach, a chapter by Dennis Schützer called Philosophical Health Meaning and the role of the other hermeneutic approach. The following chapter by Richard Sivill, who is in South Africa, is about Ubuntu. Some of you might have heard of Ubuntu, an Afro-communitarian approach to philosophical counseling and health, which emphasizes the fact that, well, before we can say I am, we should say we are, because we are predetermined, for example, by a collective language and by all sorts of networks that facilitated our emergence in the world as an individual. So from the point of view of the Ubuntu, the individual is an epiphenomenon of the collective. While sometimes where our capitalist approach looks like it's the opposite, right? We have this narrative of a hero who saves the world by making rockets land back. The next chapter by André Simones Coupanet is called What is Like to Counsel, Like a Philosopher, a Phenomenological Reading of Philosophical Health. So here he takes Horsal, which he uses in his counseling and looks at how some things that have been written before on philosophical health, for example, about deep orientation, the fact that we might have a better life if we follow a higher principle that, of course, was not forced upon us, but that we have chosen deliberately. By the way, regarding that, there is a growing so-called science of purpose. If you type science of purpose on Google, you will see that there are a lot of studies now that show that people who have a higher purpose have all sorts of benefits. It's like an alibaba cavern of benefits. The immune system is much better. You live 10 years longer. You don't have Alzheimer. Check this out. Now I feel a little bit like a charlatan from the 19th century. Buy this book and you will live 10 years longer. The next chapter is a chapter I wrote on artificial intelligence and philosophical health from analytics to creatics, where I distinguish three forms of intelligence. Analytic intelligence, which is the kind of intelligence AI is good at. Dialectic intelligence, which is both about seeing oppositions and trying to overcome them in synthesis. But also, Creolectic intelligence, which is, for me, the relationship we have with the sublime and how we make sense of things that are not necessarily known yet. So it has a creative function, or more or say better, creative resource. So we enter now the third part of the book, The World. So I think this is important because one of my dear philosophers lately, more in the last years, is Leibniz. And some of you have heard of Leibniz. He was both a mathematician, philosopher, engineer, librarian, and many other things. And he had this idea that we live in worlds, and worlds are sets of possibilities that are compostable. So if you have situations that are extremely contradictory, they might be such to the point that they are incompossible. And they cannot be part of the same world. Let's take the example of that man who was both idealistic and cynical. He was borderline, but his world was very depleted because his set of values and beliefs were not compostable. So he was really hanging by a little thread on life. And so Leibniz was really fueled by Voltaire, unfairly so, by Candide, the famous Candide. But Leibniz is insistent on the best of possible worlds. He was a mathematician. He saw that as an optimization problem. He said, well, if God exists, what God is doing, or that sort of principle that creates some sort of coherence between things, and we cannot deny that there is coherent. I mean, although I'm slowly decohering because I've been talking for an hour, I'm still here standing as one. So there are principles of composition in the world. And he said, well, God is the name of the movement that tries to optimize all these possibilities into a super world. And he saw this as something dynamic. And he saw this, I think. I mean, at least this is how I want to reintroduce his idea of composable today as the sort of, for me, the ultimate vision of philosophical health, a composable world. We've been, if you listen to politicians, for example, they talk a lot about the possible. And we've lived three centuries in which we have, I think we could call them the centuries of the possible. We've been extremely good at this form of consciousness that focuses really hard on one part of the world and comes up with a great invention. And then, oh, oops, it broke the world from another side. I'm not saying bad. Of course, that's creativity, right, the sense of the possible. But what we need today is to evolve to something even more difficult is to have a sense of the composable. That is, how do these possibles that we bring forth into the world can be harmonized at the level of the world that we call Earth and beyond? So that's why a part on the world was important. The first chapter, I think, for those of you who are academics, it's a treat. It's called professionalization and philosophical ill health maladies and counsels. And that's a very amusing fierce, but unfortunately, very true critique of academia today and how it doesn't, it's not always a very philosophically healthy place. Apart from the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, of course, this is followed by a chapter by Abdullah Basaran who is in Turkey and writes about philosophical health and the transformative power of storytelling. So this is about bibliotherapy. And as a philosophical counselor, I sometimes very often give people a text to read between sessions. I even have actually, speaking about AI, I believe that AI should help us, not replace us. And one thing that, for example, we could do, when I, let's say I have 45 sessions with one of you, I usually write keywords. And those keywords, they help me bounce to an idea and come back to you, but at the end of the session, I have this maybe 20 keyword. And so the idea is that you have an AI as the entire history of philosophy, which of course, I don't know by heart. And based on these 20 keywords, you go home with a tailored citation that the AI came up. This is doable. Actually, I do it with chat GTT. So you can do it today. That was just an anecdote, but I think it's important to see that technology is there and that it's not incompatible with a philosophically healthy world. The next chapter by Brandon Moran is on decolonization. Decolonization as philosophical health. And the very related chapter that follows by Jacob Vangus is on philosophical health in entangled cosmopolitan post-humanity, with his questions of, okay, so we are universalism, for example. We tapped into it a bit earlier. Two last chapters of this part. One on East Asian Somatic Philosophies as guides to a philosophically healthy life by Lehel Ballot, especially on the notion of key energy, that this sort of creative energy that is important in some Chinese traditions, also Japanese traditions, right? Where they had this idea that the creative force of the Earth, they entered through us by the stomach, which relates very much to what people are rediscovering today about the importance of the guts and the bacteria, even for the way we think, the way we feel. And you've all heard about Hara Kiri, right? Well, Hara Kiri is, Hara is this zone. So Hara Kiri is precisely you cut the transmission with the universe that you have at this level. The last chapter is, a chapter I wrote on philosophical health, Creolelectics and the Sense of the Possible. So Creolelectics is my method and approach and ontology for the way I do philosophical health. Basically, it's based on this idea of the possible and the composite. And how we bring forth worlds differently when we care for the whole. It's ends with a methodological epilogue on the smile method I told you about. So I think that it's exactly seven and I will now perhaps pause such that we are allowed to have a conversation. Hopefully, some of you have comments, questions. Please, I'm all ears. Thank you. My condolences. Right. Yeah. I think it's very clear. So the the philosophical course that you took allow you to explain things, I couldn't say it better. I think that clarification of our concepts is an important part, but it's just a part. And that the way I see philosophy, that it was a mutation, if you want to use a Darwinian language, think philosophy is a very, very, very recent mutation of the human species. Where we suddenly think in concepts. And so it's too new to know what it can do. But I do believe that it has both a political preoccupation, which was already there with Plato when he wrote the Republic. And he wanted also, and I think philosophers wanted to separate themselves from religions. There's this simple idea, perhaps too simple, but still it's helpful to say, OK, so religions, they promise paradise after we die. Philosophy is very concerned with paradise on Earth. And that's what the Republic of Plato is about. But it's also about how do we care about the way we view the world, but also the implication it has on our embodiment. Because we take decisions all the time that are based on beliefs. Some of these decisions, they include habits that end up being nefarious for the body. So all this is interrelated. So I do believe that the reason why analytic philosophy existed is, in fact, I would say, very human is that these philosophers, they wanted a position. And when you have a world in which the measuring paradigm is so successful, the paradigm of the sciences, it seemed to some philosophers more safe to present philosophy as close as possible to a science in order to keep their job or to get a job. And because, well, unfortunately, the kind of speculation that I think is very healthy that philosophy sometimes associated with is considered to be in-productive in bringing people to the job market, for example. I think that's unfair because there is a moment, for example, I have done interventions with corporations, engineers. And it works very well to help them realize that, yes, there might be a way of doing things that takes more into consideration, not only achieving that particular machine that they want to produce, but also see how is that going to integrate in society in life. And you know why they understand that? Because if you take, for example, energy companies that I've worked with, 70% of the projects fail, not because the technology doesn't work, but because society refuses it. And that's true in many fields. So if you have only a technological approach, you're going to end up with 70% of what you do that is not implemented. And then, of course, in the 30% that remains implemented, that doesn't mean this is good. So it's a network of decisions. And understanding how people think can be a way also to bring forth some, this is a very, in a Nordic word, consensus. But real consensus, deep consensus, not the kind of consensus that people sometimes, they have one hour of meeting, disagreeing, and then in the end, they're too tired. OK, let's go with what the boss says. So yeah, politics of academia have privileged analytic philosophy, but this might change. History goes in circles. And I mean, I do think it's kind of important to develop a healthy analytic intelligence, but that's not the only thing we need. We'll have that specialist conversation, but I want to make sure everyone is allowed to speak. You want to, I don't know who raised there. And first, I'll let you organize. OK. For artificial intelligence. My compulsive in the case of the industrial intelligence. For artificial intelligence. Well, there's a very nice metaphor at the moment online. You know, the company OpenAI. And they came up with a new product called Sora. And everybody's getting very fascinated, almost hysterical about it, because it's a text to video AI. So you describe something, and suddenly you have the film in front of you. But what I find very metaphorical is that, so at the moment, we cannot, the public cannot do it, but they posted some videos that they've done internally. And most of the videos is like, you know, kind of special effects by Blight. It's meaningless, but it's very nice. It's kind of, you know, good this artificial candy for the eye. But there's one video where the prompt is show us a French philosopher in a cafe thinking deep and discovering the ultimate meaning of the universe and realizing what truth is. That's the prompt. And in the video, you get a guy with a barrette in the cafe. And I think he's waiting for his duck. He's really hungry. I mean, it could be anything, right? I think that's the right metaphor for AI. I think it's a great tool, but it's not going to do the hard creative deep thinking that even us humans find it hard to do. So it's an interesting moment that allows us to see that analytics is not the only approach. Also, because I don't know if some of you read the myth of Merlin. Well, there are different versions, but I think there is one by Boron. Anyway, the English version where Merlin is, as you know, Merlin is the son of God and the devil. It's a lot of things to carry. But from the devil, he got the knowledge of the past, the book says. And from God, he gets the knowledge of the future. But what does AI do? Is that it predicts the future based on the novel of the past. So if you transpose that into this medieval wisdom, you get AI equal the devil. But more seriously, going back to creation. In my view, creation is not something that we humans have the monopoly of. I think I'm a process philosopher. I think life is creating all the time. The universe is creating all the time. And most of these infinite possibilities that are there as potential, they're not actualized. What we do in our world is we actualize certain possible instead of others. And then we call ourselves very proudly creators, but we are just curators of them. So that's why AI, generative AI, can do amazing things. But so can pick up. So can evolution. That's the ground of life. It's creating everywhere. That's not a problem. Whereas the problem is how do we give meaning to that? How do we make worlds that are impossible, in which the capacity for everyone to have a high sense of the possible is maximized? So I'm not anti-AI, but I don't see what's the big. I see, for example, that there will be a strong challenge to philosophical health in the use of VR, because that could be escapism. And we already, if you take the effect of television plus cinema plus now, this sort of constant entertainment if you take the effect of that on some people combined to loneliness, for example. If you add VR, which would be extremely immersive, very convincing, that's not going to be very good for well belonging, perhaps. But perhaps we'll invent, of course, we will negotiate dialectically with that. Someone else? Yes? Yes? Some problems, now, with the foreign exchange government, that sort of thing, so there are problems. You know that joke? Can I add a footnote on that? Because I'm actually starting to cover it. Yes, yes. For example, there's a nursing crisis in Finland arriving, but it's all over the world. And I think, yeah, we could redefine some professions in terms of philosophical health. But go ahead. Right. Yeah, when I was young, I was quite to the point, it's fairly important to me, I wanted to make it come afterwards, although it's alive and so on. But they were quite the 19th and even stupid sometimes. So that's it. As time passed by, and the young people became the old people, I understood that, right? In a way, what you answered, they started from scratch or not from scratch, but they also developed me. In a way, to generate hope to me, that you were able to go on and in deeper and better and brush out all the force in the end, so on. So I was, perhaps I should have started to read to all of you when I was four. But you made the start. And I think the start made me one of the best georgophical thinking. And he said that you should think that you sell to whatever you like, but you can choose what you do, what you can go on. You should think like that. And then think that all the others are not so different, that you can expect too much from others. You have to be a person that's good at it. And then you don't get to know that. Yeah, I mean, that distinction between an active person and a reactive person is essential. Since Nietzsche, that's one of the fathers, essentially. And the fact that, yes, we tend sometimes to have a sort of, what I was talking about, choice. This sort of supermarket view on meaning, right? By the way, the meaning of life is on page 142. It's, of course, my chapter. But so there is, in my counseling, I use a lot the concept of bad faith, the starter, right, which you know. This idea for those who have less heard of it is the idea that we tend to blame the past or the others or things that we've done and set for where we are now. But what existentialism say, well, where we are now, it starts anew. If you're blaming anything in the past, that's bad faith. Where we need is a leap of faith. And what you're saying about how we learn to read, because this is a little bit what I heard in what you say, is that it's true that I remember also, was if you read David Hume when you're 18, you think, but it's just so lame. And then you read it again 40 years later from your perspective and suddenly you see amazing things because, of course, if you don't have yourself, a lens, it's like you interpret things with the kind of ideology of your time. And there was a time where I stopped reading philosophy for two, three years. I was writing novels, I was reading more novels. And one day, and I was working as a journalist, and one day I went for lunch alone, and for some reason I had an article on Hegel. And I remember I was having pizza, I don't know if that means anything, but maybe the pizza had onion, why? Because I started reading this article on Hegel and I started crying. And I realized how much I missed philosophy and how important it was in my life. I quit my job as a journalist a few weeks later, became unemployed, I wrote my first philosophical essay. And I think with Hegel, by the way, I am still in that discovering faith, because Hegel is such a mountain. So it's like every decade you enter into Hegel, and you say, wow, and then perhaps there's an age for Hegel, 80 years old, I don't know. But so, yes, I think the importance of realizing also that there is no age for philosophy, there's no such thing as being old. And especially today, we'll probably live to 100, all of us. So we might start thinking what to do when we're forced into retirement by this book, and you will know. Psychological health, I'm sorry. Physical health, no. Physical health is your claim that the philosophical health is as important as your philosophical purpose. And the second one, though, I was really interested in your, you can turn back to the idea of thought, because I think we've had 40 years of being told that more and more choices have been put at the same time. I was wondering how philosophical health is so important. Exactly, and we know, for those of you who've had children, we know how much anxiety it is when you give them too much choice. So the first question, yes, certainly, that's part of the rhetoric is that I do, I don't want to argue that it's more important, or perhaps I do, but at least equally important, yes. And of course, in ways that do not separate the three, but actually sort of rediscover that they are perspectives, perhaps on the same, on the same appearance. Choice, you know, I do see some, so it's interesting, because that relates to that distinction between the potential and the actual, right? We are creatures grounded in potential. And existentially what it means is that some people think, well, as long as I don't actualize, I'm a genius, right? I am a great novelist because I haven't written any novel. I am a great philosopher because I have not yet, but potentially, ooh, and I see a lot of people like that. And even 40, they sort of indulge in potentiality. And this is favored by the spirit of capitalism, with extremely good at proposing paid solutions for that, for our procrastination, right? Oh, on Monday, you can take a guitar course. On Tuesday, you can take a yoga course, where it's important to fragment, so that you never really become a guitarist or a yoga master, et cetera, because then you might be able to do yoga, then you might realize, well, I don't need to pay for this thing, but so indeed, so there is, I think, I mean, until my 30s, I was very much engaged in politics, and I still am anti-capitalist, but in ways that are perhaps less confrontational, that's, you know, the old cliche as we get opera, but I do think that philosophical health is a political tool in terms that it is about world-forming. How do we, what do we actualize? And of course, today, we need to actualize worlds that do more with less, so just finish on choice. When I was 16, I went with a grant to Africa, Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries at that time, still to this, and it was a Marxist, actually, regime, and I went there simply because my mother was teaching there when she was pregnant, and I heard on the chat, so I was kind of there, and I went there with a grant to reflect on post-colonialism, and I was only 16, and I spent one month there alone, and it was really hard, but it was a culture shop that I think is at the base of my decision to write books, for example, try to understand the world with books because the rhythm, just the existential rhythm in Africa, and everything was so different, but just that, the relationship even to space and time was so different that when I came back to Paris, where I live, I remember standing in the supermarket in a stupor to the fact that we had 10 different kinds of toothpaste, and I know that this is something people say, right, yeah, but it was deeper in me, it was like, I was really like, this is over, I'm done, I'm not part of this world anymore, so the rest of the story is a sort of reconstruction of how to live in the Western world when we discover a much more minimalist way of living, and I'm not romanticizing it, but they probably wish to have 10 toothpaste, but I mean. So I think, yes, I think there is an idea of incompossibility, there is this idea that when you optimize a set, you, it's not that you're gonna maximize every point, so, and that's how we, it's very difficult for capitalist individuals to think like that. Everyone wants to maximize themselves, and of course, this creates chaos, so if you have a composable set, it's, well, none of the points is usually at the maximum, and first of all, it's moving all the time, so, Leibniz would consider capitalism to be a total aberration in terms of even systems it's thinking. In the summer, so some kind of man can put his mind and enjoy the lack of too much choices, because there's not that so much to do, and when they go to the local small shop, there's not too much choices, they buy what they can, and then this set with a fast black human, then we have this country used of human, there are not much choices, and the choices are getting less and less, and then back during the Soviet times, not much choices, and people are not happy with that, so the balance with them, so much choices that we can't deal with, that we are free, but not too much, it's quite difficult, and what people won't be able to say in the summer, but then it's too much, too much. Well, I think it's a good conclusion, because here you can think like an existentialist, which you sort of suggested before that you were attracted, the existentialists will say, no, the choices are infinite. There's a difference between existential choices and supermarket choices, so in Russia, there might be less supermarket choices, but they have as much possible than we have, and they will prove it soon, in a way or another, because that's history, it goes around. It's this difference between what is available in terms of choices and what we can manifest from the invisible. Perhaps we can conclude on those words, and thank you very much. But I have to mention that a lot on the final line is, the subject is medicine and culture, creating new pathways. I don't know how much it really comes into existence, but I just came to think of it. The next question is from the first question, the first question is from Karjalan, an ecologist and sociopathic researcher who is a member of the health ministry, and I'd like to welcome you to the panel. Well, thank you. Well, thank you. Well, thank you. Well, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan, Karjalan. If some of you are... If you have a beer, I'd like to offer you to get your track day or please feel free to join me. I am also...