Category: philosophical counseling

• November 2, 2012

  A brief review of the cognitive theory of emotions

  From time to time, I return to Martha Nussbaum’s understanding of our emotional life as it is elaborated in her books The Therapy of Desire and Upheavals of Thought. I have had reason to do so again recently. Diana Fritz Cates (see her book review: “Conceiving Emotions: Martha Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 31.2 (Summer, 2003),…
• November 1, 2012

  How many ways have we learned not to awaken? Reflections on the use of metaphors for Superstorm Sandy

  A storm is no neutral thing. Can we count the metaphors? Before the later-named Superstorm Sandy struck the eastern seaboard, journalists reported of citizens bracing. As it churned and grinded, cities like New York were summarily bashed, battered, pummeled, punched (as in packing a…), pounded (e.g., into submission). In the aftermath, the city, though burdened, is recovering, with businesses back and running and commuters returning…
• October 31, 2012

  Prospective, hypothetical inquiry

  Most of the work in my philosophy practice is focused on making sense of what has happened to someone where this “making sense of what has happened” involves fitting this event into a conceptual framework. Elsewhere, I have called this ‘philosophical holism’–a part is only intelligible in relation to a whole–and the insight into how…
• October 30, 2012

  ‘One feels wonderment upon witnessing a life transformed…’

  One feels wonderment upon witnessing a life transformed. What is expected is that life will stay the same in its essence or get worse with age. We get used to the idea of our burdens, are counseled to ‘manage’ or ‘cope’ with them. Sameness is our ailment, our life affliction once we have come of…
• October 29, 2012

  Some reflections on the Dyson NYRB review and on the place of philosophy in public life

  The physicist Freeman Dyson has written a book review (“What Can You Really Know?,” NYRB) that, at least in professional philosophical circles, has proved to be controversial. Near the end of the review he asks, “[W]hy did philosophy lose its bite?” and attributes the answer, in large measure, to modern science’s recent usurpation of philosophy as…