On Philosophical Self-diagnosis and Self-help: A Clarification of the Non-clinical Practice of Philosophical Counseling

In this paper I describe and analyze the need for an alternative, non-clinical approach to counseling, i.e., philosophical counseling. Throughout the first part of this paper. I aim to prove pragmatically the truth or validity of this new non-clinical approach to counseling by describing its effectiveness in a case-study. In the second part, I suggest that many philosophers have made use of philosophical self-diagnosis and self-help to improve their own well-being, although for their private practice of philosophy they did not use the words I have chosen here. I exemplify this by analyzing the representative life narrative of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a case study.