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Christopher Phillips
American philosopher From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Christopher Phillips, PhD (born July 15, 1959) is a Greek-American author, educator, consultant, lecturer, recognized as a pre-eminent practitioner and scholar of the Socratic Method, and as pro-open society advocate.[1] He likely is best known for his 2001 internationally bestselling book Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy[2], the first in what would become a 'Socrates trilogy' that includes the bestseller Six Questions of Socrates: A Modern-Day Journey of Discovery through World Philosophy," and "Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic." Public Radio International called Phillips the "Johnny Appleseed of Philosophy."[3]
Phillips's efforts are lauded for their focus on cultivating greater human autonomy, inclusive freedom of speech and expression, including at universities in this era of polarization, in ways that create more participatory societies on myriad scales His outreach over the years has significantly and organically expanded into many far-flung parts of the globe, including Latin America, Brazil, the UK, the Middle East. Phillips's stated aim is to "build intentional bridges between one human soul and society and another, in a time and clime when too many are deliberately trying to build walls between and among us." He also has been a longtime strident advocate for lowering the voting age, so that 'youthkind' and 'childkind' are no longer marginalized and can fully participate and have their voices heeded and heard in the civic-political sphere.
Additionally, Phillips has been named the first-ever Philosopher-in-Residence for the Humanity in Deep Space program, and previously was first-ever Senior Education Fellow for the National Constitution Center as well as a Network Ethics Fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. Further, Phillips is an Investment Advisor Representative with a specialty in SRI (Sustainable Responsible Impact) Investing and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) Investing - taking on this additional role with the conviction that deep Socratic inquiry of the sort he promulgates and engages in can enable each person (and group) to discover their unique path to become healthier, wealthier, and wiser, depending on their singular philosophies and aims on these key existential matters. Phillips credits the founder and CIO of the Investment Advisor with he is principally associated, and who is a graduate of St. John's College (noted for its Socratic pedagogy) and former Navy SEAL reserve commander, for steering him into this new yet complementary career pursuit.
Phillips's more recent books include A Child at Heart: Unlocking Your Creativity, Curiosity and Reason at Every Age and Stage of Life, which makes the case for how much we can learn from our youngest, and was published in March 2018 (Foreword Reviews and Adam Braun both praised it.[4] His 2022 book, Soul of Goodness: Transform Grievous Hurt, Betrayal, and Setback into Love, Joy, and Compassion, includes a Foreword by the preeminent public intellectual Dr. Cornel West and was penned following the tragically unexpected death of his beloved father, Alexander Phillips, an inspirational figure whose life was, according to Dr. Phillips, "a true Horatio Alger story" and nearly all of whose painstakingly accumulated assets over the course of more than a half century vanished upon his passing. Phillips has also penned several illustrated series of philosophical works for children and youth, including 'Day of Why', which is part of his 'Days of Wonder' series, 'The Philosophers' Club,' now the name of a series of books (which includes 'Worlds of Difference'), 'The Early Morning Princess,' and Finnegan the PhilosoFish Fights Global Warming,' the latter of which is part of his 'PhilosoAnimals' series of philosophical works for children and youth. He also is a published poet (his poems have been featured in the same journals and issues as those of the late Charles Bukowski and Ai, and also publishes whimsical rhyming illustrated works for children and youth, including 'There's a Mammoth in My Hammock!'
Phillips has dual U.S.-Greek citizenship and he is focusing increasing effort on reviving the Socratic heritage and rich tradition of philosophical inquiry in Greece, in particular on the island of Nisyros, part of the Dodecanese chain, from which his father's family immigrated to the U.S. over a century ago. (Nisyros was occupied by Italian forces starting in 1911 during the Italo-Turkish War, and then by Mussolini's fascists, prompting his grandparents to leave for the United States, whereupon, once settling in the Tampa Bay Region of Florida, his grandmother, or yiayia, became one of the first teachers of Greek language and culture, and early members of the Hellenic society Daughters of Penelope. In turn, Phillips's father, a beloved role model and inspiration in this and other regards, became a chapter President of the American Hellenic Educational and Progressive Association, or AHEPA, in Phillips's boyhood hometown of Newport News, Virginia -- all of which Phillips recounts in his book 'Soul of Goodness.'
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Early life and education
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According to Phillips, he began immersing himself in Plato's dialogues featuring the Athenian philosopher Socrates, and the historian Xenophon's Socratic dialogues, starting when he was about age 12. This inspired him to hold his first dialogues a la Socrates during lunch time at Carver Intermediate School in Newport News, Virginia, during the height of the desegregation era. After graduating from Menchville High School, he went on to garner a BA in Government from the College of William & Mary[5]. In 1997, he earned an Master of Arts in Teaching from Montclair State University, studying under the auspices of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.[6] In 2000, he earned an M.A. external degree in Humanities, with an emphasis in philosophy, at California State University, Dominguez Hills;[7] He also has a Master of Science in Natural Sciences degree from Delta State University,[8] which was the first of his master's degrees.[9] Garnering both a scholarship and a teaching fellowship, in 2010, at the age of 50, Phillips received a PhD in communications from Edith Cowan University in Australia - the subject of his doctoral dissertation (or thesis as it is known in Australia) is "Socrates café: an effective mechanism for realising a more participatory democracy".[10] Afterwards he received a three-semester appointment as a senior writing and research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and brought to campus such luminaries as Cornel West and Lawrence Lessig,whose books were among the principal texts incorporated in Phillips's classes. Despite his many academic-scholarly accomplishments, Phillips stresses that he is essentially a "street philosopher" and open society rabble rouser for the people". To that end, he routinely engages with so-called everyday people all over the world during his far-flung Socratic sojourns. He claims his "own existential lenses have been immeasurably enriched and enhanced" by his continual encounters with so-called ordinary people, who have extraordinary stores of wisdom to reveal, to themselves and to others, as a result of their inquiries "embracing the Socrates Cafe method and ethos."
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Phillips's Café Initiatives
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Phillips began his professional life in 1981 as a middle school literature teacher in a six-room schoolhouse in Casco, Maine, in the rural Lakes Region of Maine and where he held transformative Socratic circle dialogues with his students, as well as a feature and hard-news newspaper reporter in Bridgton, Maine and then in Abingdon, Virginia, garnering journalism awards. From there, he went on to become a sought-after editorial consultant and freelance journalist for regional and national magazines, from Southern Magazine to E the Environmental Magazine, to PARADE Magazine, for which he wrote features on both unsung heroes, such as Charlie DeLeo, the 'keeper of the flame' of the Statue of Liberty, and very noted ones, including a feature on former President Jimmy Carter and his involvement in Habitat for Humanity. Phillips's transformative encounter with President Carter played a decisive role in his decision to leave a promising journalism career to launch launching in 1996 what became the global grassroots Socrates Cafes, featuring a version of the Socratic Method (which Phillips calls 'the Socrates Cafe method' to differentiate it from other iterations) in a variety of venues, including cafés, community centers, nursing homes, university student centers, churches, schools (where the gatherings are sometimes called Philosophers' Club, also the name of his first children's book), mental health facilities, and prisons.[11] Phillips' idea of having open-invitation meetings in which participants methodically and empathically explore life's most timely yet timeless questions was inspired in part by Matthew Lipman, the founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children who advocated introducing philosophy into schools and under whom Phillips studied,[12] as well as by Marc Sautet, of whose Café Philosophique Phillips became aware after reading an article about Sautet while Phillips was teaching English at university and earning a master's degree in the Mississippi Delta.[13]
Besides the Socrates Cafe, Phillips has launched kindred initiatives, including Democracy Cafe, Constitution Cafe, Spirit of '76 Cafe (part of his Declaration Project, and most recently, a Shakespeare Cafe, all aiming in singular yet interconnected ways to make ours a world without fences. This latter project, which is resonating across the U.S. and, increasingly, on a global level, springs originally from the tragically unexpected, mysterious death of his father (Phillips notes in his book 'Soul of Goodness' and elsewhere that he was never so much as directly informed by those who were with his father in the days leading up to his passing that he had died, and based on testimonies of some of those closest to his father, he came to the heartrending conclusion that his father in all likelihood was unspeakably betrayed, in 'a tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions' - at the hands of the very ones his father said he had rescued repeatedly from one financial-legal imbroglio (of ever-ascending seriousness) after another.
In his critically acclaimed book "Constitution Café: Jefferson's Brew for a True Revolution", Phillips recounts his journey across the U.S. holding offbeat mini-constitutional conventions, inspired by his fellow College of William & Mary alumnus Thomas Jefferson,[14] and driven by the Jeffersonian idea of the tandem of ward republics that lead to 'true democracy', and hinge on exercising democratic freedom, experimentation and practicing broad pluralistic inclusiveness.[15] He has since launched the Declaration Project, a one-of-a-kind initiative that came to be in anticipation of our 250-anniversary celebration in 2026 of the release of our July 4, 1776 Declaration. It features a comprehensive collection of declarations of independence, causes, rights, and principles from across the ages and continents (including the Declarations from our original colonies that preceded our nation's July 4, Declaration of Independence),[16] but scores of others from centuries earlier and ones that have been issued since that were inspired by our July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence. Two other facets of this project include the Spirit of '76 Cafe initiative, featuring questions for rigorous, impassioned exploration that spring from our July 4, 1776 document, as well as 'My Declaration,' which provides the tools and a forum for people to sculpt their own declaration. Phillips considers these initiatives, from Socrates Cafe to Constitution Cafe[17], Democracy Cafe[18], to Spirit of '76 Cafe, and most recently Shakespeare Cafe, to be all of a piece, in the theme-and-variation symphonic sense. Phillips also co-founded a for-profit consulting service, Socrates Group (Phillips often receives invitations from the public and private sectors to lead workshops that give them tools to become more artful questioners (his assertion has always been that all the right questions promisingly lead to a whole new host and range of creative answers, roadmaps, correctives to even our most intractable problems), empathic listeners, creative and critical thinkers and doers), with Dennis K. Dienst, as well as the nonprofit Democracy Cafe, with Cecilia Chapa Phillips.
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Academic career
Phillips was a 2012 recipient of the Distinguished American Leadership Award, along with Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise.[19] Phillips has also taught in the graduate program Media, Culture and Communication at New York University,[20] and at the University of Pennsylvania as a Senior Writing and Research Fellow.[21] He has been Senior Education Fellow at the National Constitution Center[22] and 2014–15 Network Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.[23] He publishes essays on Substack , Medium, and elsewhere, and has a broad social media presence, along with an eclectic Socrates Cafe Youtube channel that features everything from his public exchanges around the world to one-on-one exchanges, including with the likes of such luminaries as global poverty warrior Jeffrey Sachs, and other renowned public intellectuals, educators and scholars, such as Cornel West, Robert P. George and Lawrence Lessig, He also has published occasionally on Zocalo Public Square[24] Previously, Phillips was a longtime blogger for the now-defunct Huffington Post blogging site, but his collection of posts are still accessible there.
Published works
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Books
The books published by Phillips are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):
- Constitution Cafe: Jefferson's Brew for a True Revolution (ISBN 978-0-393-06480-3) (W.W. Norton, 2011)
- Socrates in Love: Philosophy for a Die-Hard Romantic (ISBN 978-0393330670) (W.W. Norton, 2007) [Published in numerous other languages]
- Six Questions of Socrates: A Modern-Day Journey of Discovery through World Philosophy (ISBN 978-0393326796) (W.W. Norton, 2004) [Published as well in many other languages]
- Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy (ISBN 978-0393322989) (W.W. Norton, 2001) [Widely published also in other languages]
- A Child at Heart: Unlocking Your Creativity, Curiosity and Reason at Every Age and Stage of Life (Skyhorse, 2018), ISBN 1510729631 [Published in other languages as well]
- Ceci Ann's Day of Why (ISBN 978-1582461717) (Penguin Random House, 2006) [this is now independently published as 'Day of Why,' part of Phillip's 'Days of Wonder' series; it is published in other languages, including Mayan languages as well as Spanish, Korean, Greek, Japanese]
- The Philosophers' Club (ISBN 978-1582460390) (Penguin Random House, 2004) [This is now independently published, and is part of a Philosophers' Club series of books that includes 'Worlds of Difference'
- Soul of Goodness: Transform Grievous Hurt, Betrayal, and Setback into Love, Joy, and Compassion, with a Foreword by Dr. Cornel West [ISBN-10. 163388788X. ISBN-13. 978-1633887886]
Papers
Phillips wrote, among many others, the following papers:
- "Coalition" M/C Journal, Vol. 13, No. 6 (2010)
- "The Austrian Philosopher Who Showed that Words Can Spark Humanism – Or Barbarism"," Zocalo Public Square, January 31, 2018
- "Philosophical Counseling: An Ancient Practice Is Being Rejuvenated," Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, Vol. 14, Issue 1, 1998, pp. 48–49
- "Daring to Revise America's Sacred Text", San Francisco Chronicle, Opinion Page, July 3, 2017
- "Socratic Inquiry for All Ages", Vol. 8, No. 15, 2012, Childhood & Philosophy
- "Why aren't kids part of 'All men are created equal'?", Huffington Post, December 9, 2014
- "Live Like Picasso: Nurturing Fluid Intelligence and an 'Artistic Dimension", Huffington Post, December 19, 2014
- "The Efficacy of the Lipmanian Approach to Teaching Philosophy for Children", Childhood & Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 13, 2011
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See also
References
External links
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