Philosophical Practice and Values Based Ethics: Rethinking Social Action and Core Values

Abstract

Concerns regarding philosophical practice (philosophical counselling) are closely related to those for bioethics, and in general for applied ethics. Unlike ethics counselling, in which the strategies of solving ethical dilemmas that the individual or institutionalised subject is facing, and the entire area of existential issues of the subject, are targeted, the purpose of philosophical practice is to help the individual deal with existential dilemmas, and through means of philosophical instruments, to identify his own position and philosophical attitude. Within this paper we will analyse the main critics brought to philosophical practice as a particular style of philosophising, but also as an au- tonomous branch of philosophy. We will expose a series of theoretical foundations originating in the reinterpretation of the Categorical Imperative and the introduction of the appreciation capacity as phenomenological expression of the orientation towards alterity, of a new approach of the phil- osophical practice based on an appreciative ethics.

Keywords: philosophical practice; values based ethics; rethinking social action; core values