Shlomit C. Schuster

Shlomit C. Schuster was born in 1951 in Suriname

Schuster was born on 19 July 1951 in Paramaribo, Suriname, then a Dutch colony. She moved to Israel in 1976.

She studied philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1987, after reading a newspaper article, she trained in philosophical counseling with the Dutch philosopher Ad Hoogendijk. She earned her doctorate from the Hebrew University in 2000, with a thesis supervised by Marcel-Jacques Dubois and Maurice S. Friedman on how the lives of central philosophers can help people with existential questions.

In 1989 she opened the Sophon center for philosophical counseling in Jerusalem. In 1990 she started a free philosophical phone help line for people in distress. In 1996 she founded the Israeli association for philosophical counseling and headed it.

She wrote books on philosophical practice and sat on the editorial boards of several journals. She opposed licensing philosophical counselors, arguing that it would limit free thought. She died in Jerusalem on 15 February 2016 after a serious illness.