Pablo Corral Vega
Philosophical counselor
Conversations to examine one’s own life with the help of philosophy. Privately, in my studio, or in a group, on specific dates during the year.
Philosophy is not a subject reserved for specialists. For centuries it was a practice: a way of looking at one’s own life afresh in order to live it with more lucidity. Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault described it as a care of the self. That is what this is about.
There are no diagnoses or protocols, no religious or spiritual formulas. There is a conversation partner, texts we read together and time to think aloud.
What it is
A philosophical counselor
Philosophical counseling was born in Germany in 1981, when the philosopher Gerd B. Achenbach opened the first philosophical practice in Bergisch Gladbach, near Cologne: a place to talk with anyone who wished to think through their own life. Today it is practised in many countries. In the United States, the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA) and the American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), founded in New York in 1998, train and certify philosophical counselors. It does not treat symptoms or seek to cure: it accompanies thinking.
A philosophical counselor does not tell you what to do. They help you see more clearly what you are already living: the questions that occupy you, the ideas from which you decide, what you take for granted. To do so they use the tools of philosophy —the question, the distinction, the attentive reading of great texts— and invite you to look at your situation from another place. Often what changes is not the situation, but the way of looking at it.
Two ways
Alone or in a group
Individual sessions
An hour and a half, in person, in my studio in Quito. The first half hour is a threshold for leaving the noise of the day behind: we read, in silence or with music. The following hour is dialogue.
We choose the readings together, according to what concerns you and what you believe: from Lao Tzu to Nietzsche, by way of Epictetus, Goethe or Simone Weil. Sometimes also walks, symbolic gestures, writing.
Philosophical exercises in a group
Weekend gatherings with a small group, to read, talk, look and let go. The last one was at Hacienda Cusín, in Ecuador; the next one is in Mallorca, on 7–8 November 2026.
Is it for you?
For anyone with a question
For anyone going through a transition, a loss, a question that will not leave them in peace — or who feels they are living in grey, absent from their own life. No background in philosophy is needed: curiosity and the wish to talk are enough.
Philosophical counseling does not replace psychological or psychiatric therapy; it can accompany it.
Who I am
Pablo Corral Vega
Photographer, writer and philosophical counselor. My work has appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times and Smithsonian. I have published eight books —for one of them, Andes, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote twenty short stories—, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and Secretary of Culture of Quito. I trained as a lawyer. I hold a master’s degree in the Philosophy of Care from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, with a thesis on tenderness.
Photography taught me what Simone Weil called attention: being wholly present before what is in front of us, without judging it. That is what I bring to each conversation.
A first conversation
Write to me
Tell me in a couple of lines what brings you, and we will find a day.