Scientific, Philosophical, and Practical Elements of Two New Philosophical Group Practices: Dialectic into Dialogos and the Socratic Search Space
Interdisciplinary Research in Counseling Ethics and Philosophy - IRCEP December 24, 2025 John Vervaeke, Rick Repetti, Christopher Mastropietro et al.
Two group philosophical practices—Dialectic into Dialogos (DiD) and the Socratic Search Space (SSS)—are described and contrasted with Nelsonian Socratic Dialogue (NSD). NSD aims for consensus by extracting a virtue concept from personal experiences, then testing it through Socratic questioning, making it a 'cataphatic' or positive practice. DiD instead leads participants into aporetic engagement with a virtue concept, making it 'apophatic' or negative. SSS integrates elements of both, balancing cataphatic and apophatic approaches. DiD and SSS are designed to induce dialogical flow states (Dialogos) that afford transformative experiences of distributed cognition, described by practitioners as a 'secular séance' that ignites Heraclitus's metaphorical fire associated with Logos, the intelligibility of ultimate reality. The paper presents cognitive science, philosophical, and practical supports, ethical considerations, and relevance amid the AI revolution and meaning crisis.