Filozofski savjetnik, Vol 1. Br 1.

Dear readers, with no small pride and joy, we have the honour of presenting the first issue ofThe Philosophical Counselor — an international interdisciplinary journal for philosophical practice,psychotherapy, and the philosophy of health. Launched under the auspices of the Croatian Associationfor Philosophical Practice, collaboratively joined with numerous valued colleagues and partnerinstitutions from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria, Germany, Spain, and Portugal,and intentionally united and aligned in the research-driven inquiry and practical steps toward bridgingencounters between philosophy, medicine, psychology, psychotherapy, law, and numerous otherdisciplines and their perspectives.As an editorial board, we are compelled to note that a similar interdisciplinary publicationplatform currently does not exist in Croatia and the wider region, and by launching The PhilosophicalCounsellor, we seek, among other things, to adequately fill this gap — and more broadly, to address thecrisis on the path toward healing society, science, and human culture in general. Particularlyphilosophical culture, which, from the initially "etiquette-like" function of ancient classical principlesand paradigms, has been socially reduced to a marginal museum-academic influence and significance— one that, paradoxically, has become far more elitist than the original aristocratic-type Greek roots.Those roots were fundamentally oriented toward healing, understanding, and care, through refinedepistemic-ontological engagement with the relational particularities at hand, primarily within the Greekand Roman world, and now in relation to the actualities of the contemporary liberal-capitalist"Western world." Through this, among other things, we seek to awaken — or rather, to recollect(anamnesis) — our esteemed readership, maieutically bringing forth the critically minded philosopherof constructive practice within each of you, regardless of the type and degree of disciplinary or anyother expertise.Philosophical Counselor is therefore, above all, a place of encounter. A gathering point, a platform,a creative space of creation in which dialogue carries equal weight as the content that flows from it.As editors-in-chief, colleague Gruica and colleague Janeš, we are convinced that the very existence ofsuch a space — a space in which philosophers, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, pedagogues, lawyers,artists, and all those interested in practical work with human beings can freely meet and converse —represents a value in itself, independent of any individual contribution. For without a place, there isno conversation, and without conversation, there is none of what this journal signals by its very name: Counsel. Counsel presupposes a relationship. It presupposes someone who speaks from experience andsomeone who receives that experience, reshapes it, and carries it forward. It is precisely for this reasonthat the phenomenological perspective of lived experience (Erlebnis, présence vivante) is both one ofthe methodological themes of this journal and its epistemic axis. The phenomenology ofpsychopathology proceeds from the thesis that illness, suffering, or existential crisis are not entitiesthat a person "has" as one has an object in one's pocket, but rather dynamic clusters of experiencesthat a person is at a given moment of their duration — within the conditions that society hasestablished and through which it implicitly shapes the trajectories of those experiences. Theseexperiences, in their concreteness, must be the starting point of every philosophical, therapeutic, ormedical intervention that wishes to be not only technically correct, but humanly relevant.Lived experience is therefore both the object of inquiry and the method. Here,phenomenology meets the tradition of philosophical practice stretching from the Socraticconversation to contemporary philosophical counselling: philosophy has never been merely a theoryabout the world, but a way of living within it. One who philosophises does not stand outside life andobserve it; they participate in it, examine it, and through that examination transform both themselvesand their interlocutor. Practice is not the application of theory — it is always thinking in contact withreality.Beyond the scientific and ethical principles of an integrative orientational disposition, thejournal also seeks to provide space for artistic expression — both visual and literary — through thesections Visual Arts, Philosophical Comic, and Logopis (from the Croatian Puto-pis, Travel log(os)),striving thereby to breathe into our journal the living fire of the phenomenological spatiality of life.