Philosophy and Psychology
2025-12-15
Sometime in the next few weeks my friend Adrian Lory and I will hold a Substack Live video conversation about philosophy and psychology as complementary paths to wisdom and fulfillment. In preparation, I've been thinking up some questions about the relationship between philosophy and psychology, as well as their respective contributions to the good life. Here's what I have so far:
- Is the psychological construct of subjective well-being the best measure of happiness or fulfillment? Can a person's flourishing be measured scientifically? What do we gain and lose by defining such measures?
- Traditional philosophy was more judgmental than modern psychology (e.g., Socrates asserted that the unexamined life is not worth living, which implies that some ways of life have more worth than others). Does an emphasis on environmental factors or in-born personality dispositions as opposed to acquired character traits or virtues and vices deprive us of important insights into human behavior?
- Both philosophy and psychology contain movements or schools of thought; how do these "isms" contribute to or detract from the underlying goal of philosophical enlightenment or psychological health?
- Can or should psychology formulate an equivalent to Pierre Hadot's identification of philosophy as a way of life?
- From its ancient roots, philosophy has been centered around the passionate practice of wisdom and the ideal of the sage (e.g., Socrates, Confucius, the Buddha). How does this differ from the scientific, value-neutral aspirations of psychology?
- At the very end of the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle argues that the highest and best standard of soulcraft is to base one's choices on the cultivation of the divine aspects of personhood, where the Greek word for cultivation is therapeia. How does psychological therapy differ from this (admittedly vague) notion of philosophical therapeia?
Stay tuned for details about the Substack Live session and be sure to subscribe to Adrian's Substack so that you can see what fascinating questions he's been thinking up. :-)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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