International Journal of Philosophical Practice

This article shows how Buddhist philosophies are consistent with the rational counseling approach of Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), as presented in Elliot D. Cohen’s book, The New Rational Therapy: Thinking Your Way To Serenity, Success, and Profound Happiness. It presents many Buddhist insights as pathways to the “transcendent” or guiding virtues of LBT, and, accordingly, as philosophical antidotes to its eleven “cardinal fallacies.” It therefore helpfully adds to the repertoire of philosophies that can be used by LBT counselors in helping counselees address their problems of living.

After coining the term “philopsychy” to describe a “soul-loving” approach to philosophical practice, especially when it welcomes a creative synthesis of philosophy and psychology, this article identifies a system of geometrical figures (or “maps”) that can be used to stimulate reflection on various types of perspectival differences. The maps are part of the author’s previously established mapping methodology, known as the Geometry of Logic. As an illustration of how philosophy can influence the development of psychology, Immanuel Kant’s table of twelve categories and Carl Jung’s theory of psychological types are shown to share a common logical structure. Just as Kant proposes four basic categories, each expressed in termsof three subordinate categories, Jung proposes four basic person­ality functions, each having three possible manifestations. The concluding section presents four scenarios illustrating how such maps can be used in philosophical counseling sessions to stimulate philopsychic insight.

This article examines four key metaphysical assumptions of LBT regarding human emotions, human fallibility, reality, and human freedom. By way of examining these assumptions it shows how the theory of LBT systematically integrates philosophy and logic into a cognitive-behavioral approach to philosophical practice.

In this essay I consider the question of whether Elliot D. Cohen has justified sufficiently the metaphysical basis for his Logic-Based Therapy as presented in his paper on “The Metaphysics of Logic-Based Therapy (IJPP, this issue). Although Cohen discusses four different foundations of his cognitive theory, I focus only on one. It is the most important basis of his theory, viz., that human beings logically deduce the cognitive-behavior com­ponents of their emotions from premises. First, I question Cohen’s analysis of the emotion rules we use to deduce evaluations of actions from. Second, I challenge Cohen’s view that we deduce our evaluations from emotion rules. Although I do not think my challenges completely undermine Cohen’s theory, they do raise serious concerns for a theory faced with a preponderance of causal therapies.

This paper examines the role of myth and metaphor in Logic-Based Therapy as these pertain to the development and use of philosophical antidotes. It maintains that the use of myth and metaphor in LBT can provide a primer for counselees for constructing antidotes for overcoming the real life problems for which they seek counseling.

The article offers a brief set of definitions of metaphysical and epistemological principles underlying three distinct theories of consciousness and then relates these paradigms to a triad of contemporary therapeutic modalities. Accordingly, it connects materialism, empiricism, determinism and a passive interpretation of the “mind”=brain to medication interventions and behavioral and cognitive treatments. In this context, the paper proceeds to argue that these treatment approaches are theoretically incapable of addressing the dominant issue of man’s loneliness, and his struggle to escape from it, as the most basic universal drivein human beings. Next, it discusses the dualist, idealist, and rationalist assumptions of an active reflexive, self-consciousness, which has dominated insight-oriented treatment methodologies since Freud. And, finally, it treats the Hesperian and Sartre an phenomenological andexistential descriptions of awareness as grounded in the transcen­dent principle of intentionality emphasizing the aspects of the freedom of consciousness. Lastly, it claims that the first view stresses the temporal present; the second the past; and the third the future.

Despite the readily available discussion on counseling supervision models for over a quarter of a century, there is little attention in the literature with respect to how developmental supervision models align with existential philosophy. One model, The Integrated Developmental Model (IDM), is a robust and well-accepted model of supervision with embedded undertones of existentialism requiring scholarly discussion. The primary goal of this article is to emphasize the parallels between the IDM and Sartre’s philosophical principles of existentialism thereby creating a meaning making framework for supervisors to enhance developmental growth of their supervisees.