Philosophic Medicine is a form of discussion-based counseling that helps people better understand themselves, form healthier habits of thinking, and improve their lives. It is a path for personal development between psychotherapy or coaching, which often aren’t philosophical enough, and abstract reasoning, which is often too impersonal to have a therapeutic effect without practice.

Using ideas and techniques from the world’s most enduring sources of wisdom, our conversations aim to transform unconsidered, rigid, and unnecessary ways of thinking and acting into intellectual humility and compassionate understanding through skeptical reasoning, imaginative exercises, meditation, and more.

 
 
“To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.”
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN
 
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Nick Harrison, Ph.D.

Philosopher, teacher, and Healer

I was born and raised in Southwestern, CT not far from New York City. My family holds nothing in higher esteem than education, but I’ve been a terrible student for most of my life. Disorganized, unmotivated by grades, largely uninterested in the curricula, but passionate and highly imaginative, I was perpetually in trouble with my teachers.

Like many in my peer group I was diagnosed with ADHD and given a daily stimulant to function better within the confines of the classroom. In high school I was diagnosed with depression and medicated for that too; after narrowly graduating, I began to self-identify as an alcohol, cannabis, and amphetamine addict.

Encouraged by my family after a series of false starts, I enrolled a few years later at the local university, clean and sober and determined to finally succeed academically. I quickly discovered that philosophy, at least as it was presented by my first teacher, was exactly the discipline I needed. It could train my wild mind by the pure ecstasy of using it well.

After about a decade of formal philosophical study, I was overwhelmed by an instantaneous realization that this material, typically reserved for specialists and academics, has incredible potential as a healing tool—philosophic medicine. I had already been using philosophy this way for most of my life; I knew it worked.

Because I’d long suspected my struggles with mental health were more complicated than any institution was equipped to appreciate, my research interests developed organically around a complex of relationships between self-conception, health & disease, and moral education. Although my scholarly work is in the philosophy of science and biomedical/research ethics, as a professor and practitioner I am much indebted to Asian philosophy, stoicism, North American indigenous philosophy, pragmatism, existentialism, feminism, critical race theory, deep ecology, and mysticism.

As a certified client counselor of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), I teach individuals, couples, and small groups how to develop habits of philosophical thinking that can clarify and solve (or often dissolve) many problems of living. I live with my partner and two dogs in Western Massachusetts and work with clients worldwide.