Courses & Training

Courses and trainings are an opportunity to deepen understanding, engage deeply with a community, and build skill in intentional and structured ways.

Current offerings:

This fourth instance of our 12-week intensive will explore and refine the various principles, roles and skills of Dialectic into Dialogos. This dialogue-based practice, derived from the Socratic tradition, turns the art of conversation into a more ancient way of doing philosophy – a living form of disclosure and discovery, and a path for cultivating virtue, insight and a pursuit of the Good. The course will provide extensive training in the different skills of this technique, ongoing instruction and mentorship, creative and relationship-building exercises, regular group practice, and readings from relevant philosophical traditions. 

Testimonials

Since participating in the intensive, many of our participants report noticing a greater capacity for listening and tracking the quality and flow of their conversations. Some report reorienting how they approach engaging with ideas with others and several who own business have even have integrated some of our approaches in the workplace.

Read on below for some direct quotes.

…it is the most important work in the world right now…

Let me extend my deepest gratitude for the work you and your team are doing. To me, it is the most important work in the world right now that needs to be done for the future. Every time I look at my kids and think about the world they are growing into, I know this is the case. Your work has altered my own life in profoundly positive and continually unfolding ways.

 The way in which you have put the program together… was masterful.
Alistair M.

Strong positive impact on my life…

There is a spiritual, transformative aspect to the practice that has had a definite and stron[g] positive impact on my life. [I now approach] nearly all of my speech as a proposal. I’m [also] more mindful of the type of conversation I’m holding with another, and the dynamics and framing of it, thanks to the attention of DiD. I use the skills learned in DiD [intensive] regularly in other domains, such as business meetings.

Overall, I absolutely love this practice … and am grateful for all my training and time in it.
Ryan Barton
Entrepreneur and Socratic Counselor

Perfect combination of theory and practice…

[The] course in Dialectic into Dialogos was excellent! Perfect combination of theory and practice, with practice taking up the greater share – which is something I need, as I learn best by doing.
Rick Repetti
VP American Philosophy Practitioners Association (APPA)

In business, it has been very helpful…

In general, I am more curious about situations – including finding myself noticing that I am curious during [MMA] sparring sessions. I am [also] definitely more skilled and patient in conversations [and] in business, it has been very helpful with discovering our team’s collective intelligence on the direction of the industry.
Eric Foster
Digital Media and Marketing Agency CEO

…access The Good

I approach some conversations differently now [and] I never gave much thought to virtues, and especially how they interrelate. Now, I think of [them] as different ways to access The Good.
Pheobe L.

Virtue really matters…

I really appreciated the way [DiD] shows you the way virtue really matters in even the smallest moments of our everyday lives.
Nathan F.

Course Details

New: Participants from this course will have access to recurring DiD practice sessions on ATM (launching soon) for free, during the course and indefinitely after!

Course leaders: Christopher Mastropietro and Taylor Barratt. John Vervaeke will appear as a guest instructor for one or two sessions.

Course requirements: All are welcome. Registrants do not need to have prior knowledge in philosophy or previous experience with the practice.

Course format: The course will take place in live sessions on Zoom

Time commitment: Saturdays from 10am EST to 1pm EST* [3 hours]. Course is currently scheduled to run from January 25th, 2025 to April 12th, 2025 (dates will be confirmed for when registration opens).

Please note*: The Eastern time zone will be authoritative throughout and we will send google calendar entries for the sessions which should automatically handle this for those of you not in the Eastern time zone. Still please be conscious of the fact that Daylight Savings Time starts here in NA on March 10th, so please adjust your scheduling accordingly as certain parts of the world do not change at the same time (or at all).

Cost: $1200 USD (Early Bird Price: $950 via Coupon Code to be offered when registration opens)

Refund Policy: Please see our general policy on the Join Practice page. For this course, refunds are available if requested 10 days or more in advance of course start. Within 10 days of the first session, registrants may transfer their spot to another approved (by ATM) participant but are responsible for any agreement between the two parties. As per the general policy, once the course starts, there are no refunds or substitutions.

The many twentieth century elegies—from Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, and Herman Melville, among others—depicted the madness that grips human beings when our primordial spirituality resurfaces without a symbolic container to tame it. They illustrated the horror of will without wisdom, the realization that we lack an ultimate measure of realness, of goodness, some higher order that can guide the course and direction of our lives. Pure will revealed itself to be destructive, so we call out for some new cosmic constraint, something to tell us what the world is, and who we are within it. What must we do? How must we live? We cry these questions into a vacuum. “If there is no God,” Dostoyevsky famously wrote, “then everything is permitted.”    

~ Excerpt from the upcoming book, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis 

The greatest heralds of human grief are not philosophers, but artists. In this 8-week course, Dr. John Vervaeke will explore some of the most significant literary figures of the meaning crisis, powerful works of literature that depicted the fitfulness and existential agony of the modern person, and his unsheltered encounter with the numinous.

  • The course will run for 8 weeks. Classes will run for 2 hours, including both lecture and discussion.  
  • Students are responsible for procuring and reading the books ahead of time (reading list in registration description) 

Novels & Poetry

  • Week 1: Moby Dick (I), Herman Melville
  • Week 2: Moby Dick (II), Herman Melville
  • Week 3: Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad 
  • Week 4: The Death of Ivan Illych, Leo Tolstoy  
  • Week 5: The Plague, Albert Camus
  • Week 6: Death in Venice, Thomas Mann 
  • Week 7: Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Week 8: Poetry 
    • Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold 
    • The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
    • Dream within a Dream, Edgar Allen Pow
    • The Panther, Rainer Marie Rilke
    • Ah, not to be cut off, Rainer Marie Rilke

Live Online Lecture & Discussion Schedule: Mondays from 10am EDT to 12pm EDT* [2 hours]. Course will run from April 29th, 2024 to July 1st, 2024 (no sessions on June 3rd or June 10th).

Cost: $650 USD (Live Participation – Limit 30) – $400 USD (Self-Study Option)

Refund Policy: Please see our general policy on the Join Practice page. For this course, refunds are available if requested 10 days or more in advance of course start. Within 10 days of the first session, registrants may transfer their spot to another participant (notify us) but are responsible for any agreement between the two parties. As per the general policy, once the course starts, there are no refunds or substitutions.

In this highly experiential 4-hour workshop on accessible philosophy we’ll introduce and engage with several of the Vervaeke Foundations’ core practices including Philosophical Fellowship and Dialectic-into-Dialogos along with Authentic Relating warm-up exercises with small and large group sharing.

Philosophical Fellowship is a small-group practice borrowed from the monastic scriptural and communal reading practice of Lectio Divina. Our practice allows us to come into closer contact – cultivating an emergent and collective perspective – with a segment of a philosophical text that is provided during the workshop.

Dialectic-into-Dialogos is also a small-group practice, reverse engineered from the socratic practice of dialectic where participants make in-the-moment proposals and explorations of a virtue. When done well, DiD allows us to move from a practice of collective intelligence into one of collective wisdom.

For more information on the VF’s pedagogical program, offered more thoroughly as the VF EoP, please visit this page.

Please note, this workshop is not part of the [VFEoP] program. This workshop is largely aimed for people who are not able to participate in the daily VF EoP program.

For full information including registration, view this page here.

An eight-week course examining the philosophical elucidations of, and responses to, the problem of nihilism. Designed for those seeking a rich philosophical education in the meaning crisis. Four books are covered deeply by John in the course.

More information and registration at https://halkyonacademy.teachable.com/p/beyond-nihilism 

More Wise: A two-day introduction to ecologies of practice, design principles, and experience with Dialogue, Imaginal, Mindful, and Embodiment (DIME) practices. Designed for those seeking to understand and experience practice, or who are looking to connect practice properly into a meta-curriculum.  Next course offering TBA.

More information (past): https://awakentomeaning.com/event/more-wise-how-to-practice-wisdom-july-8th-and-9th/