Aleksandar Fatic

This chapter discusses the structure of motivation, including the balance of motives, developing a comprehensive account of motivational and behavioural compensations. An overarching principle of the geometry of motivation is that of symmetry, where experience, values, and sensibility all play a part in how a person will approach what could broadly be considered a life project and how one will address important individual situations faced in life. The key role of modality and modal thinking in general in understanding the symmetry of motivation is reflected in the particular choices a person makes seen as geometrical outcomes or an interplay of various motivational directions. In psychosis, where a disturbed reality defines the person’s experience of the world, a particular geometry of motivation remains as basic structure.

A resurgence of scholarly work on proof of God?s existence is noticeable over the past decade, with considerable emphasis on attempts to provide?analytic proof? based on the meanings and logic of various identity statements which constitute premises of the syllogisms of the?proof?. Most recently perhaps, Emmanuel Rutten?s?modal-epistemic proof? has drawn serious academic attention. Like other?analytic? and strictly logical proofs of God?s existence, Rutten?s proof has been found flawed. In this paper I discuss the possibility of an?ethics-based? identity proof of God?s existence. Such a proof, the first version of which, I believe, has been offered, indirectly, by Nikolai Lossky, utilizes the form and structure of the analytic proof, but fundamentally rests on the perception of moral values we associate with God and Godliness. The nature of the proof shifts the focus of the very attempt to?prove? God?s existence from what I believe is an unreasonable standard, unattainable even in?proving? the existence of the more mundane world, towards a more functional, practical and attainable standard. The proof proposed initially by Lossky, and in a more systematic form here, I believe, shows the indubitable existence of God in the sense of his moral presence in the lives of the faithful, at least with the same degree of certainty as the presence or?existence? of anything else that can be epistemically proven in principle.

This paper examines the conceptual matrix of philosophical counseling, and philosophical practice generally, which distinguishes philosophical practice from mainstream theoretical philosophy. I argue that the essence of philosophical practice is the realization and radicalization of Pierre Hadot’s paradigmshifting view of ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life,’ through the projection of philosophical concepts and methods to the goal of attainment of the good life by moral education and character-building. The base-line concept of the good life that the paper works with is the relatively uncontroversial concept of a life based on sustained reflected pleasures that are both socially desirable and individually fulfilling. I argue that this type of concept of the good life as qualified pleasure is inherent in any doctrinal account of what it is to lead a good life, including the ones that emphasise asceticism, such as Christian philosophy of life and ethics. Finally the paper concludes that projections of the good life by philosophical counselors are reflective on philosophical counselor themselves: philosophical counseling is a way of ‘the good life’ that aims to use the resources of philosophy as a whole to help others build the moral qualities and character required to reach their own good lives. By projecting philosophical concepts and methods to the applied conceptual matrix of moral education and the good life, philosophical counseling emancipates philosophy as a whole from its current remoteness and isolation into an active, and reflective, role in the real lives of ordinary people. This heralds a paradigm shift in philosophy, from the pseudo-science that much of mainstream philosophy painstakingly pretends to be to an intellectual powerhouse for the enhancement of the quality, clarity and integrity of life, which was the reason philosophy initially emerged for, both in the Western and in the Eastern philosophical traditions

The book addresses the growing interconnectedness between philosophical counseling and traditional psychotherapy. It explores the organic links between core philosophical concepts and theories, and the corresponding problems and theories in psychotherapy. Aleksandar Fatic focuses on the use of modal logic as a foundation for psychotherapy within the proposed Modal Integrative Psychotherapy model. The book functions both as a research work and a manual for the development and application of integrative psychotherapy, viewed through the lens of philosophical counseling and the exploration of the logical underpinnings of psychotherapy as its conceptual foundation.

The paper deals with the phenomenology of empathy as a particular attitude, but also as an ethical principle. The authors draw a distinction between two key conceptualizations of empathy in recent philosophy: (1) the one that sees empathy as a sort of “fusion” or the interpenetration of emotions of the observer, and the person who the observer empathizes with; this view of empathy derives mainly from the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment and in particular David Hume; and (2) the one that understands empathy as the ability to sympathize with others, whilst maintaining a clear awareness that the primary emotions of the person empathized with are not our emotions, or the emotions of the observer who empathizes. The latter view of empathy is perhaps first attributable to Max Scheler, and has recently been experimentally supported by Martin Hoffman in his research on empathy in overall moral development. The authors presently argue that the latter concept presents empathy as a relational emotion (emotion that concerns the substantive emotions of other people). They distinguish between relational emotions and meta-emotions, namely the emotions we feel concerning our other emotions. Further, the authors argue that relational emotions are a foundation for sentimentalist ethics, which can support the principle of moral obligation or duty. The text goes on to show why the notion of an organic community, based on the model of a functional group whose relations do not have to be mediated by institutional processes, is in itself a favourable context for improving mental well-being and establishing resistance mechanisms that characterize the very conceptualization of mental health. The authors believe that empathy contributes to individual and collective resilience not by denying individual vulnerability, but transforming it into predispositions for leadership based on emotionality and perception, even of institutions and corporate structures, as “small societies” in which the same types of social capital as in organic communities play a key role, above all moral emotions such as trust, empathy and solidarity.

Abstract:In this paper, I suggest that the moral incompetence in narcissism is associated with a particular type of emotional incompetence, namely the incompetence to experience the moral emotions, such as empathy, solidarity, loyalty, or love. I then move on to discussing the ethical ramifications of this incompetence, primarily from the point of view of sentimentalist ethics, and conclude that emotional incompetence does not in fact reduce the moral responsibility of a narcissist person, whether diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or not. My argument is based on the three criteria of moral responsibility proposed by Philip Pettit, namely those of value relevance, value judgment, and value sensitivity. I suggest that a sentimentalist ethical perspective entails that the satisfaction of two of the mentioned criteria (awareness of the social meaning of one’s choices and sufficient control of one’s actions) constitutes a moral obligation for the agent to satisfy the third criterion, namely to develop the appropriate moral sensibility and competence to actually choose morally correctly. This type of structure of obligation elucidates why narcissism is at the same time a moral failure and a psychopathology. At the same time, my argument portrays narcissism as a particular type of personality disturbance that almost uniquely reaffirms the role of moral re-education as the psychotherapeutic approach. This conclusion points to a potential revival of some of the precepts of Pinel’s affective psycho-pathology, dating back to the very beginnings of the psychotherapeutic clinic.

The conclusion summarizes the ways in which Modal Integrative Psychotherapy (MIP) may be seen as revolutionizing conventional psychotherapy by introducing the idea of “switching modal worlds”, not just within the subjectivity of the client, but also “worlds”, as sets of circumstances described in modal logic, within which subjective experience occurs. Such a shift of emphasis from an essentially subjectivist position to a fundamentally more ambitious conceptual approach to both lived experience and psychotherapy challenges certain conventional norms, including the blurring of the distinction between “reality” and “subjectivity” and the notion of how different experiential worlds might or might not be called into actual experience by the use of MIP technique.

Joseph Agassi’s last book, The Philosophy of Practical Affairs, offers a comprehensive look at key philosophical topics and doctrines with a common focus on the role of rationality, the evolution of rationality and the relationship between rationality and akin phenomena. A key topic he addresses is the relationship between rationality and magic. This dichotomy reverberates on a number of areas of applied philosophy, including philosophical practice and philosophically informed psychotherapy. Agassi’s views on magic offer a fundamentally rationalist view of the phenomenon of magic, however they open up significant inroads into nuanced insights of how magic can be seen as a cognitively significant complement to rationality in the strict sense.