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 third 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. 

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 also be a recurring guest instructor.

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 will run from January 27th, 2023 to April 27th, 2024 (no session for February 10th).

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 EBDID24 until December 31st, 2023)

Scholarship: We will be holding two spots for scholarship applications for those with limited financial means. Application form is available here, completed applications must be submitted by 5pm EST January 18th, 2024.

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/