How to Live Through Difficult Times

A six-week in-person practical philosophy course for people who care deeply about the world.

The world can feel like a lot right now. Uncertainty, suffering, political instability, and rapid change raise questions that don’t have easy answers.

How do we live well when so much feels outside our control? What responsibilities do we have to other people? How do we remain engaged with the world without becoming overwhelmed by it? Where do we find hope and meaning when the future feels uncertain?

These aren’t new questions.

Human beings have been wrestling with them for thousands of years.

This six-week course is an opportunity to slow down, think deeply, and explore what philosophy might have to offer us as we navigate difficult times.

No background in philosophy is required.

This isn’t a course about memorizing what philosophers thought.

We’ll absolutely spend time with philosophers and philosophical traditions. But the goal isn’t for you to walk away able to explain the finer details of Plato, Sartre, or the Stoics.

The goal is to develop and deepen your own thinking.

Philosophy is a way of understanding the world. Over six weeks, we’ll use philosophical ideas to help us examine our assumptions, wrestle with difficult questions, and think more deeply about how we want to live.

You’ll encounter ideas from philosophers who have wrestled with these questions before us. Then we’ll put those ideas to work on questions that matter in our lives today.

Over six weeks, we’ll explore questions about:

Control & Uncertainty
How do we live with the reality that so much of what matters to us is outside our control?

Suffering & Care
What do we do with suffering, our own and other people’s, without looking away from it?

Responsibilities to Others
What do we owe other people, particularly when meeting those responsibilities asks something difficult of us?

Community in Difficult Times
What does it mean to participate in community when crisis can make us want to withdraw?

Hope & Meaning
How do we build meaning and sustain hope without pretending everything is going to be okay?

Come prepared to think.

This will be a participatory course built around discussion, reflection, and philosophical practice.

I’ll introduce philosophical ideas and frameworks that can help us approach the questions we’re exploring. We’ll think together about what those ideas illuminate, where they fall short, and what happens when we apply them to our own lives and the world around us.

You won’t be expected to arrive with the right answers.

In fact, one of the things philosophy can teach us is how to stay with important questions long enough to discover that our first answer might not be our best one.

Learn to think more philosophically in everyday life.

Throughout the course, we’ll practice ways of thinking that you can carry with you long after our six weeks together.

That might mean learning to uncover an assumption hidden underneath an argument, distinguish ideas that initially seem like the same thing, or find the root and follow the branches: distill a question down to its fundamental principle and then explore the implications that grow from it.

The goal isn’t simply to have six interesting conversations.

It’s to leave better equipped to think deeply about the questions that matter to you.

This course might be for you if…

You find yourself thinking deeply about what’s happening in the world and aren’t satisfied with easy answers.

You want to remain engaged with other people and the world around you, even when doing so is difficult.

You’re curious about philosophy but aren’t particularly interested in going back to school or spending hours deciphering dense philosophical texts.

You want a space where people can wrestle seriously with difficult questions without needing to agree about all the answers.

You want to develop your own thinking rather than simply being told what to think.

You do not need any previous experience with philosophy. Curiosity and a willingness to think together are enough.

Course Details

Six Thursday evenings at 6:00 PM
October 1, 8, 22, 29 and November 5, 12
Technology Resource Center, South Bend – 1165 Franklin St #100, South Bend, IN 46601

*Note there is no session on October 15*

$150 for all six sessions

Limited scholarships are available. Email dr.louise@empowermentthroughthought.com for information about scholarships.

About Dr. Louise Williams

Dr. Louise Williams is a practical philosopher and certified philosophical counselor with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. She has spent more than a decade studying, teaching, and practicing philosophy.

Today, her work focuses on bringing philosophy outside the Ivory Tower and into everyday life. Through her philosophical counseling practice, Empowerment Through Thought, and her local Philosophy Club, she helps people use philosophy to think more deeply about the questions that actually matter to them.

Louise believes philosophy is a way of understanding the world, and that you don’t need a philosophy degree or a stack of dense books to benefit from philosophical thinking. Her work is about helping people develop and deepen their own thinking with the assistance of philosophers who have been wrestling with life’s difficult questions for thousands of years.