8Th ICPP: Sevilla. Spain, April 19-22, 2006

The 8th ICPP in Sevilla

Background & Summary

ETOR group was one of the working groups of the Asociación de Estudios Humanísiticos y Filosofía Práctica X- XI (Association for Humanistic Studies and Philosophical Practice X-XI). It was born in 1999 and their members were students, teachers and professors coming from the University of Seville. At the beginning, ETOR studied how Heidegger’s philosophy could be useful for working in philosophical counseling. Its main members were Professor Ordóñez-García and Francisco Macera-Garfia. José Barrientos-Rastrojo jointed in 2001. Other members were Gabriel Arnáiz, Francisco Pacheco, Miguel Valero, Francisco Barrera, Fernando Gilabert and Eduardo Vergara, among others. They created their particular method on Philosophical Practice with for stages: To listen, to hear, to cope with and to derive. Soon, they started to organize some events. The first important one was the Iberoamerican Conference on Philosophical Practice (2004). Moreover, they devised several university courses since 2001 and they opened a philosophical consultation to received counselees. In 2004, Barrientos- Rastrojo, Gabriel Arnáiz and Manuel López-Baroni went to the 7th International Conference on Philosophical Practice (Denmark) to propose Seville to hold the 8th ICPP. Some people have known the work developed by ETOR (Amir, Marinoff, Brenifier, Lahav, among others). After discussing two proposals to hold the conference, Seville was selected.

One important idea of the conference was to take this field to Spanish-speaking world because most of the works and people working on the topic were English speakers. Therefore, there were lectures and workshops in Spanish and English. The topic of the conference was “Philosophical Practice: from theory to practice”. It aims to create a dialogue about how theoretical philosophers can be used in Philosophical Practice. For example, to devise cartesian workshops. Furthermore, lectures should to propose new fields in Philosophical Practice, for example with drug addicts, with female prisoners or homosexual people.

Main organizers of the conference were Barrientos-Rastrojo, Macera-Garfia and Ordóñez-García.

The conference exceeded its expectations. We had to close registration a month before it, because more than 400 people want to attend and the main room hasn’t more seats. Some of the most well-known philosophical practitioners attend the conference: Ran Lahav, Lou Marinoff, Shlomit Schuster, Lydia Amir, Peter Raabe, Oscar Brenifier, Anders Lindseth, John Michael Russell, Leon de Haas, Ora Gruengaard, etc… There were some relevants interventions. Ran Lahav organized a Philosophical Retreat in Spain with José Barrientos-Rastrojo in 2005. He has started to work on Contemplative Philosophy there. His conference was an opportunity to expose to a large audience the main pillars of his theory.

Peter Raabe explained the basis of the lessons he lecture at the University of Fraser Valley in Canadá.

Lou Marinoff developed his own lecture and workshop with several participants.

In addition, we had time to hear lectures by the President and Vicepresident of the IGPP.

Moreover, we had the opportunity to attend the lectures by Lydia Amir and a paper on Philosophical Counseling and the disaster of Katrina by Donald O’Donaghue.

It is painful to remember Michael Russell and Shlomit Schuster that now are part of the past of this field. But we are happy to meet then work with them.

We learned a lot from workshops and another lectures:

We were very proud to have some cultural visits. The best one was a dinner/cocktail at the most ancient European palace in Europe: The Seville Alcazar. That was very famous after that because Game of Thrones filmed several seasons there.

The second day we went to dinner at the most typical bar of ‘Flamenco’ in Seville: The ‘Carboneria’.

And participants could enjoy the typical Spanish dishes as these photos shows.

The conference dates was April because Seville is very hot in summer (45º Celsius degree or more). Last day, we have the session to analyze the conference. We made a toast with people for the success. Some people said that they felt the closeness of Spanish people and they named the conference as the ‘friendship’ ICPP. There were several countries to be proposed to hold the next conference. It was decided that next one would be in México (Cancún). At the end, it wasn’t celebrated there, so that it was changed for the next one (Italy). There were to books of proceedings: Spanish papers in English were released in the book Philosophical Practice and Spanish ones were published in Dominios de Aplicación Práctica de la Filosofía (Areas for application of Philosophical Practice) and English papers were released in Philosophical Practice. More than 20,000 copies were released in the first month. The most important Spanish Mass-medias spread out information on the conference (Spanish TV and Radios, Andalusian Radios, Yahoo, and others made interviews). Here are a brief selection of them.

More Pictures from the 8th ICPP