Philosophical Counseling as Clinical Intervention: The Epistemic Death-Contemplation (EDC) Framework for End-of-Life Care

Terminal illness exposes individuals to a radical confrontation with finitude, generating noetic disruption—an existential rupture that destabilizes ontological orientation, fractures the coherence of selfhood, and unsettles intersubjective relations. Yet most therapeutic models treat death as a source of anxiety to be regulated rather than an epistemic horizon to be understood. In response, this study introduces the Epistemic Death-Contemplation (EDC) framework as a philosophical counseling intervention that reconceptualizes death as an epistemic horizon through which epistemic framing, meaning reconstruction, identity reconfiguration, and existential authenticity can emerge. Developed within philosophical counseling, EDC operates as a clinical model of conceptual intervention, grounded in the claim that existential suffering contains implicit epistemic structures that can be clarified and transformed through guided philosophical inquiry. Its five-stage protocol enables a systematic movement from noetic disruption toward epistemic insight, allowing individuals to re-examine foundational assumptions about self, the Other, and Being. Through epistemic reframing, death-awareness becomes a lens for reassessing life-meanings, ethical commitments, and the ontological significance of finitude. EDC demonstrates how philosophical counseling can function as a rigorous clinical intervention—not by treating symptoms, but by restructuring the epistemic and existential frameworks through which individuals interpret suffering and mortality. As such, it provides a theoretical foundation for integrating philosophical reasoning into clinical practice, enhancing authenticity, existential clarity, and overall well-being.

Keywords:

Epistemic Death-Contemplation (EDC) , Philosophical Counseling , Noetic Disruption , End-of-Life Care , clinical intervention