One-to-one
A continuing conversation with someone who knows how you think. Full attention, and room to follow what matters to you.
Individual Membership
A compartment of your own.
A year of philosophy with John and David. No syllabus. We follow what becomes interesting.
One-to-one, in a small group, or both.
Members Open your compartmentPlease touchReserved
Twenty-two objects in the collection. Number twenty-three is yours. Type your name, then print.
Compartment 23 is yours. See what a year might put in it
At a glance
The small print, in large print.
- Length
- One yearRenewable
- Fee
- £12,950a year
- Format
- One-to-one, a small group, or both
- Prior study
- NoneCuriosity is enough
- Only us. Your year is with John and David, personally.
- Small on purpose. Groups stay small. You’re never one of a crowd.
- The work comes first. You get the conversation you need, not the one you’d have ordered.
- Built to last. We’re after a long relationship, not a transaction.
Where it begins
Everyone starts with The Ground.
First, the assumptions underneath how you see, know and value things. Pull a drawer.
Ontology
What you believe about how the world, and the people in it, work.
Epistemology
How you decide what to believe.
Axiology
What you consider worth pursuing, and why.
These questions give us somewhere to begin. We return to them as your understanding develops.
Try it yourself Free
Start exploring these three questions now with The Ground Beneath, a free twenty-minute instrument that maps what you assume about reality, knowledge and value.
Begin The Ground BeneathHow it develops
Then it unfolds.
Think of the best thing you ever stumbled into: a book someone pressed on you, a conversation that ran late, a wrong turn that came good. Nobody planned it. That’s why there’s no syllabus here.
What a year might hold. Yours follows your questions.
A year, empty0 of 12
Twelve compartments, one for each month.
Keep scrolling, or press Next month, and watch them fill.
- The Ground’s three drawers. What you take to be real, how you know, and what matters.
- The question you arrived with. Still a bit crumpled. That’s how they usually arrive.
- Heraclitus, on change. A jar of river. It’s already a different one.
- An argument you lost, usefully. Worth more than most of the ones you won.
- A book you didn’t expect to love. You’d never have picked it up on your own.
- Lao Tzu, on not forcing it. The boat goes where the water goes, and gets there.
- A decision, examined before it was made. Both directions, looked at properly.
- Someone else’s question. Still on your mind a week later.
- Arendt, on thinking without a banister. No handrail. You climb it anyway.
- A belief, retired with thanks. It served you well. It gets a clock.
- Something difficult, returned to. It opens differently the second time.
- A question you couldn’t have asked at the start. It grew here.
Sartre one month, biology the next, or whatever happened on Tuesday morning. Your questions set the course. We bring the thinkers you’d never have gone looking for.
Over time, things build up: a vocabulary, better questions, things you’ve changed your mind about, and a philosophy that’s increasingly your own.
You don’t need to know what you want to learn before you begin.
Who you might meet
Old minds, live questions.
Six of the many you might meet. Turn one over to see what they’d ask you.
Six stickers from a very large box.
Tonight’s tables are setThe album
And fifty-three more.
Every member keeps an old-school sticker album of fifty-nine thinkers, and The Ground, where everyone starts. A sticker goes in each time we explore a thinker together. The deepest come in bronze, silver and gold, one for each session you take.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky1821–1881No. 21
- Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Silver
- No. 23Rudolf Steiner
- William James1842–1910No. 24
- No. 25Henri BergsonWant
- No. 26Ludwig Klages
- No. 27José Ortega y Gasset
- Albert Schweitzer1875–1965No. 28
- No. 29Max Scheler
- No. 30G. I. Gurdjieff
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976Gold
- No. 32Alfred North Whitehead
- Carl Jung1875–1961No. 33
- No. 34Jakob von Uexküll
- No. 35Sri Aurobindo
- Albert Camus1913–1960No. 36
- Simone Weil1909–1943No. 37
- Ludwig Wittgenstein1889–1951No. 38
- No. 39Merleau-PontyWant
- Simone de Beauvoir1908–1986No. 40
- 20InquirerTwenty stickers. You’ve started asking better questions.
- 40InterlocutorForty stickers. You can hold your own with them.
- 60CompanionThe full album. It takes years. That’s rather the point.
How you take part
One-to-one, or alongside others.
A matched group
A few people who take each other’s questions seriously. Someone else’s question is often the one you’re still thinking about a week later.
Membership can include both. We agree the mix with you before you start.
For the family
And something for the kitchen table.
Membership includes a place on Syntropise Kids, a six-week philosophy club for members’ children aged 11 to 15. Six strange questions, six thinkers, four places, and a box of numbered envelopes that arrives in the post before week one.
One place per household each year, subject to cohort availability.
Try one now
Pick one up while you’re here.
Four objects live in this room. Take one out and try it on something real.
Practicalities
A few practical questions.
Membership · nine cards
Probably, if you keep coming back to questions the working day leaves no room for.
Thinking Fit takes seven minutes and gives us somewhere to start.
None. You need time for it, and a willingness to question views you’ve held for years.
You already have one. It shapes your decisions whether you’ve examined it or not.
When its parts pull in different directions, pressure decides which wins. Examining it lets you decide instead.
No. Convictions you can act on, held loosely enough to change when the reasons do.
£12,950 for the year.
Pay it in one go or in instalments, whichever suits you. It covers the whole year, however we end up meeting.
There’s no set number. Some people meet every couple of weeks all year. Others come in bursts, around the busy seasons of their work.
We agree a rhythm that suits you, and change it when your year does.
Yes. Bring a thinker, a book or an idea you’ve been turning over.
Yes. Membership includes a place on Syntropise Kids, a six-week philosophy club for members’ children aged 11 to 15. One place per household each year, subject to cohort availability.
With a conversation. You get to know us; we get a sense of whether it would suit you. The first one costs nothing.
Private viewings by appointment
Ring for a curator.
Tell us what’s on your mind. The first conversation costs nothing, and you don’t need to prepare a thing.
Or write to hello@syntropise.com