John Stoszkowski

Syntropising life through philosophy.

Portrait of Dr John Stoszkowski

About me

I explore what makes people, ideas, and living systems come alive, rather than fall apart.

For fifteen years, I did this in academia, researching and teaching how we learn and develop judgement. These days, I point philosophy at the life people are actually living.

More about me

Books

Cover of Being Well by Daniel Massaro and John Stoszkowski

Being Well

A sporting life asks everything of you and then, one day, ends. This is what existential philosophy has to say about living that life well, on the field and long after you leave it.

Buy on Amazon

Royalties go to the MND Association.
Cover of The Syntropist by John Stoszkowski

The Syntropist

In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer unearths a forbidden question: what do you want to become?

Buy on Amazon

Royalties go to Hospice at Home.
Cover of The Clearing by John Stoszkowski

The Clearing

A people who can no longer die have nothing left to risk, and whatever risks nothing quietly stops living. This novel explores why a life that can’t end isn’t a life that’s been saved.

Syntropology essays

Menyhért Palágyi and the Living Imagination

A forgotten Hungarian philosopher on imagination as a faculty for perceiving what is really there, rather than a machine for making things up.

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The Tao of Heidegger

Two traditions, separated by two thousand years and half a world, arriving at strikingly similar conclusions about letting things be what they are.

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Ray Peat and the Art of Becoming

What a biologist working on metabolism understood about change, and why becoming anything at all costs more energy than we tend to admit.

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All essays

Work with me

Alongside Syntropise, I keep a deliberately small diary of one-to-one clients.

They arrive with something worth thinking seriously about, and what they need is somewhere to think.

I provide a space to do exactly that without being managed, diagnosed, flattered, optimised, or quietly steered towards somebody else’s answer.

See if we’re a good fit

Paintings

Some of my favourite thinkers, painted by me. None of them sat still for it.

Also, some memes

Philosophy doesn’t have to be humourless. Drag the top one away, or just tap it.

Say hello

If any of this chimes with you, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Drop me a line