Publications

Here find philosophy at play, dancing over the concepts and chasms that keep us in quandary. Elite-credentialed street-level guru-ignoramus Michael Picard, MSc PhD, takes aim at public opinion, giving it a friendly push into the deep end. He dives into dozens of crowd-sourced topics that reflect the grass-roots community that sprang up around Café Philosophy, the weekly public participatory philosophy series he hosted for over 12 years. Philosophy is for thinking people. Those who need it most are those with the sorest need to avail themselves of the power of thought. Forget the elite, it is the public that has the greatest need for philosophy. This book will help you think for yourself.

This collection is the first book in English to look closely at the phenomenon and theory of philosophy in a café. The simple activity of reasoning together in a café is relevant to several areas of philosophy: epistemology, including critical thinking; social and political philosophy, notably democratic theory; and philosophy of education, among other areas. This book brings together the international voices of numerous facilitators of engaged philosophical inquiry, including some of the most prominent, together with observers in allied fields, to explore practical and organizational issues, but also to bring critical and theoretical perspectives to bear on café philosophy.

This book is the chief statement of German philosopher, Gerd Achenbach, founder of Philosophical Praxis, who in pioneering this revival of philosophy for life spawned a global movement. Philosophical Praxis is the alternative to psychotherapy for people not satisfied to muddle through life or merely exist. Not a method or a teaching, not diagnosis, treatment, or therapy, not a ready-made rule of life for you to conform to. It is no preformed application, but the use of philosophy to aid the individual, the organization and society to come to self-understanding, so that people may thrive and live up to being themselves.

Translation of Gerd B. Achenbach's Vom Richtigen im Falschen. “On Right in Wrong” is the second book (after Philosophical Praxis (Bloomsbury 2024) to offer English-speaking readers the opportunity to discover Achenbach's life-oriented and life-affirming world of thought. Threaded throughout the variegated chapters, the question, ‘What can right still mean in a world gone wrong?’, affords a fascinating glimpse of the charms and challenges of human life that we are unable to embrace with self-righteous certainty but only, if at all, with a far-sighted forbearance, a joyfulness that redeems the serious. Prof. Dr. Michael Picard has once again succeeded in producing a sensitive translation that brings out the intellectual and linguistic richness of the work while intimating the author's temperament.