Hi, I'm Chris

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I absolutely adore philosophy, and I've discovered how much fun it can be when people philosophize together. Below are the various ways I'm exploring that.

• Let me know if you'd like to join in!

Philosophical Salons

A Philosophical Salon is a hosted conversation organized around a topic we explore together; the topic is the protagonist, and the evening exists to see what becomes visible when different people gather around it. Participants contribute ideas, experiences, questions, stories, disagreements, and connections, without being required to reach a common answer. I attend primarily to the conversational field—balancing participation, deepening promising threads, introducing provocative questions, and redirecting when conversation becomes narrow or inert. A successful salon leaves participants intellectually enlivened and perhaps carrying new thoughts or questions.

Inquiry Gatherings

An Inquiry Gathering is a collaborative investigation organized around a question the group will genuinely attempt to answer. Here, the question is the protagonist. Participants propose answers, clarify meanings, offer experiences and examples, identify assumptions, test distinctions, raise counterexamples, and revise their thinking as the inquiry develops. My role is to keep the group answerable to the question, preserve discoveries, and intervene when we drift into serial opinion-sharing, premature agreement, or debate without examination. A successful Inquiry Gathering brings us closer to an adequate provisional answer or, perhaps, reveals why the question remains unresolved, where disagreements lie, or how the question itself might need to change.

Philosophical Discovery

An Evening of Philosophical Discovery is a small-group encounter organized around philosophical inquiry that becomes alive within the participants. Here, the protagonist is their emerging participation in philosophy, with the offered topic providing a place from which discovery can begin. Participants pay attention to their own experience, notice what interests or unsettles them, form questions that matter to them, and engage those questions with reflection, silence, and conversation with others. I cultivate the conditions for that movement by reducing pressures that suppress participation, returning abstraction to lived experience, protecting tentative discoveries, asking questions that open rather than direct, and helping participants notice philosophical capacities already at work. A successful evening isn't about answers but participants having genuinely done philosophy and leaving with a stronger recognition that philosophical inquiry is available to them.

Philosophy in the Round

Philosophy in the Round is a structured inquiry practice in which the usually blended activities of philosophical conversation are separated into roles. This lets them be enacted and observed more clearly; the process of inquiry becomes the protagonist. Participants will voluntarily take turns serving as explorer, guide, and observers: the explorer asks a question they are living with, the guide supports the inquiry without supplying answers, and observers pay attention to both general and specific movements, capacities, or dynamics before the group conducts a shared harvest. I establish and protect the roles, help participants resist advice-giving, diagnosis, and disguised debate and direct attention toward what the inquiry itself reveals. A successful round both advances the immediate inquiry and helps participants become more capable of recognizing, practicing, and supporting philosophical activity in themselves and others.

Philosophical Expeditions

A Philosophical Expedition begins with some kind of philosophical terrain: an experience, cultural practice, philosophical concept, text, Philosopher, or inherited idea. The terrain is the protagonist, and the purpose is to explore it attentively rather than only receive information or exchange immediate opinions about it. Participants encounter selected material, notice what it reveals or disrupts, raise questions, make distinctions, connect it with experience, and follow the paths of inquiry that emerge. My role is to choose and prepare the terrain, provide enough orientation to make entry possible, guide attention toward important features without dictating what must be found, and help the group move between encounter, interpretation, and reflection. A successful Expedition leaves participants with a closer and usable relationship to the terrain: they understand why it matters, see more of it, and can carry something from it into their philosophical lives.

Philosophical Companionship

Philosophical Companionship is an ongoing one-to-one relationship organized around the participant’s philosophical life; their questions, experiences, disorientations, developing practices, and relationship with reality are the protagonists. The participant brings whatever is presently alive or difficult, and together we may investigate a question, examine an interpretation, enter a relevant inheritance, practice a philosophical capacity, or remain with uncertainty long enough for its shape to become clearer. I accompany rather than prescribe: remembering what has emerged over time, offering questions and resources, noticing recurring patterns, and helping the participant remain open and answerable without determining what their life should become. Successful Companionship strengthens the participant’s ability to recognize and faithfully steward their own philosophical life, even when no final answer or predetermined destination is available.

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Contact

Let me know what sounds intertesting, what's on your mind, your favorite philosopher, or anything else you'd like.

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Nisl blandit