Practical Philosopher. Writer. Teacher.

I work with executives, portfolio managers, and serious practitioners who see that something fundamental is missing and who are ready to find out what it is. I offer one-on-one philosophical conversations and meditative instruction. To learn more, start here.

New Book

The Art of Inquiry

Meditations on Living Wisdom

We start off in blindness. Almost none of us know what we’re doing here. A philosophical grownup admits what the rest of us deny.

The Art of Inquiry: Meditations on Living Wisdom is a philosophical guide for the perplexed–not as consolation but as invitation. Drawing on fifteen years of philosophical practice with seekers, executives, artists, and ordinary people trying to make sense of their lives, Andrew Taggart maps the terrain from existential confusion to a clarity that, once arrived at, doesn’t leave.

Part essay collection, part manual, part memoir, The Art of Inquiry moves from the nature of wisdom and the life-need of philosophy to a practical guide on how philosophical inquiry actually works–and what happens when it is carried all the way through. It closes with a piece of performance art: a live conversation with Claude on the question of what genuine inquiry requires, and what a machine, however brilliant, cannot supply.

In these pages, you’ll encounter:

• Philosophy as a life-need–arriving uninvited, at the moment life stops making sense
• The movement from existential confusion to unimaginable clarity–one that can’t be rushed or bypassed
• Wisdom understood as knowing how to live and living that knowledge knowingly
• The Socratic and Daoist traditions brought to bear on the demands of our time
• A rigorous account of what philosophical inquiry requires–something that no AI, whose lights may seem to be on, can yet provide

For those who have been summoned by the question of how to live, this is where the inquiry begins.