Even though philosophy is the business of abstract thought, it has enormous practical, albeit often tacit, implications. It is, in itself, a method of interacting with, responding to, and questioning the world. It could even be seen as a way of being in that world; for as Creel argues (2001, p.24), “when we try to stop doing philosophy, we find it’s like trying to hold our breath indefinitely- we just can’t do it!” The goal of philosophy is knowledge and truth about reality but not for their own sake; by considering what and how we know in the abstract, we seek to be better prepared to act effectively and to live well.
Like the philosopher, the coach seeks to pull out the essentials from the messy immediacy of the situation and to question premises and motivations in order to create clarity and understanding. Like the philosopher, the coach rarely stops with the first question asked. In these respects, a coaching session or relationship could be conceptualised as an opportunity to ‘do’ philosophy. Coaching can be seen as being first and foremost about helping a client think through a current problem efficiently and effectively; and to this end it is an applied philosophy of knowledge. To put it another way, whereas the goal of philosophy is knowledge and truth about reality and value at a more universal level, the goal of coaching is knowledge and the truth about reality and values at an individual level (for clients and coaches alike). The coach and the philosopher have, therefore, much in common. We have argued already that the content of philosophical thought can help practitioners to enquire of and develop their practice. We are also saying here that thinking philosophically can provide us with models of how we might think about coaching practice.
Let us briefly illustrate these two points. Student coaches learn that it is good to ask questions. They learn that open questions are more effective than closed questions (this is well covered in the practitioner literature). They may learn to ask questions to elicit the client’s understanding rather than their own. They may learn these as techniques and may be quite good at these techniques. Imagine now that a coach decides he/ she has a strong orientation towards relativism as a result of reflecting on their underlying philosophical orientation. Questioning then becomes not just a method, but the expression of a belie£ It no longer needs to be remembered, but rather can be noticed, challenged, and refined. It is no longer something the coach simply does, but something the coach wants. Further, the coach may come to increasingly develop practice by thinking philosophically and questioning the coherence of their ideas about their practice (e.g., what happens if I abandon all pretense of knowing anything about the client’s world view? What if I knew nothing?).
As we have said, the influence of traditional philosophical ideas typically goes unnoticed. In the following sections we introduce six major philosophical thinkers from the Western tradition, with a particular focus on epistemology, and we consider how elements of their thinking are in evidence in coaching practice. We have been selective in our choice of influences and have decided that these six in particular offer a spread and continuity of ideas. We freely acknowledge the absence of women and eastern philosophers in this list; similarly, we have not investigated the contribution of critical approaches such as Marxism and feminism and we have avoided the complexities of existentialism and postmodernism. There is so much to be said about all of these and we do not intend to imply that those we have chosen to highlight the ‘best’ of philosophy. It is, indeed, a ‘conventional’ choice and it is intended only as a starting point.
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