Aleksandar Fatic

Professional ethics codes in psychotherapy instantiate deontological frameworks that privilege rule specification over character cultivation, yet empirical research demonstrates that therapeutic effectiveness depends primarily on relationship quality rather than adherence to procedural protocols. This paradox reveals structural inadequacy in contemporary approaches to professional responsibility. This paper argues that the paradox cannot be resolved within deontological frameworks because authentic empathy, understood through Schopenhauer's metaphysics as recognition that suffering constitutes the Will's essential nature, necessarily transcends contractual boundaries that presuppose the principium individuationis. The argument proceeds through three interconnected stages. First, Schopenhauerian compassion provides metaphysical foundation for understanding empathy as ontological recognition rather than psychological technique. Second, virtue ethics frameworks address the irreducible role of phronesis in navigating moral complexity that rule application cannot accommodate. Third, philosophical counseling exemplifies character based professional practice demonstrating how practitioners can maintain ethical integrity without reducing responsibility to rule compliance. The paper engages situationist challenges, addresses character assessment concerns, and demonstrates that professional ethics requires virtue frameworks acknowledging the constitutive rather than merely instrumental role of practitioner character in achieving therapeutic goods. This reconceptualization addresses the contemporary crisis in psychotherapy marked by increasing rates of therapeutic failure, burnout, and ethical violations that additional rules cannot solve.

The need for philosophical practice to integrate various methods, both conceptual and those based on the use of emotions, raises the question as to whether its methodology is necessarily eclectic, in terms of the collection of various methodologies used in philosophy, or whether there is a way to move beyond eclecticism. This is the main subject of this paper. In other words, the question is whether there is such a thing as an ‘integrative’ methodology and, if so, what distinguishes such a method from mere eclecticism. In this text, we define the methodological procedure of integrativeness as the process of systematizing perspectives into an orientational answer to the demands of a specific problem. What differentiates such an approach from mere summation is a new contribution that results from a synergistic and systematic meeting of positions and argumentations whose final result differs from its initial elements. Diversity in the form of a multidimensional relationship towards life and the world results in numerous perspectives, which is a value that should be cultivated and integrated into a reflective and actional perception of the world.

This chapter discusses the relationships between the nominalist nature of psychiatric diagnoses, as described by Paul Verhaeghe, and the modal logical context of psychotherapy. The nominalist view portrays psychodiagnosis as storytelling, rather than medical diagnostics, and offers various narrative and, by extension, metaphysical possibilities for the inculcation of logical modality in the conceptualization of psychotherapy, including the idea of changing modal worlds, or possible worlds, as key elements in Modal Integrative Psychotherapy.

The essay examines the central role that pleasure plays in a wide range of conceptualisations of happiness or ‘good life’, from Epicurean hedonism, to Christian asceticism, to contemporary cases of pastoral and philosophical counselling. Despite the apparent moral chasm between hedonists and ascetics, a look at the practices promoted by Epicurus and the Christian monastic fathers reveals striking similarities. The reason is that, at a fundamental level, both parties agree that one should reject the vulgar pleasures that society glorifies, and develop a refined attitude that seeks the appropriate and natural pleasures, while ignoring the harmful or unnecessary ones. And such an attitude can only be acquired through moral training, either by philosophical instruction and reflection, or by pastoral counselling. We highlight some important parallels regarding the connection between pleasure and happiness, as conceived by Epicureans and monastic fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. We begin by discussing elements of Epicureanism that can also be found in its rival philosophical schools and Christianity, mainly the emphasis on forming the right conception of happiness and acting in accordance with it. We then examine the connection between morality and happiness in the Christian Orthodox monasticism. We argue that Christian ascetic ethics not only condone some types of pleasures, but in fact require them as elements of happiness in this life that play an instrumental role for the Christian soteriological dogma. The argument has wider philosophical significance because it shows that pleasure is indeed a fundamental conceptual ingredient of happiness across different normative ethical contexts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Why Narcissists Are Morally ResponsibleAleksandar Fatic, PhDIn his insightful commentary of ‘Narcissism as a moral incompetence,’ Professor Pies proposes several principal objections to my line of argument. First, Pies mentions that I embrace a Platonic essentialism and a ‘binary’ view of narcissism, whilst in fact narcissistic traits present themselves in degrees, within a continuum of pathology.Let us clarify the meaning of essentialism. When applied to the phenomenology of narcissism, Platonic essentialism would imply that there is an idea, or ideal, of ‘pure’ narcissism, which governs our cognition of narcissistic phenomenology. Without an ‘essentialist’ understanding of what narcissism as a more or less pure phenomenon would look like, it would make no semantic or logical sense to speak of various ‘types’ or ‘degrees’ of narcissism. In the 1940s, in The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle offered the now infamous logical analysis of ‘false’ and ‘true coins’: if there were not true coins of which we had some idea, it would be logically impossible to speak of counterfeit coins (McDermid, 2004; Ryle, 1949, pp. 94–99). There are shoddily produced coins that bear only a vague resemblance to the original idea or mint of the real coin, however, for each we would ultimately have to decide whether the resemblance is sufficient for it to be considered a real coin. Shoddily produced coins represent various ‘degrees’ of resemblance of the idea, or form, of a coin, but to call them coins, and to decide whether they are true coins or not, it is a logical presupposition that we must first have an ‘idea’ of what an ‘ideal’ real coin is like. This, at its core, is essentialism.There is no escape from this type of essentialism in any rigorous argument, because Platonic essentialism is the foundation of the very meanings of the concepts we use. Plato’s ideas are paradigms, where the particular instantiations of their qualities are called ‘phenomena’ (Sedley, 2016; Taylor, 2016). Thus, the nuanced expression of ideas or forms in their various phenomena is the very substance of the essentialist theory of ideas. It appears that Professor Pies is also a Platonic essentialist, as am I.So why is it often impossible in clinical practice to ascribe necessary and sufficient conditions to narcissism? Well, let us remember Rosenhan’s experiments (1973). Rosenhan illustrates how the same individuals were diagnosed with very different disorders by different clinicians at roughly the same time, and how healthy individuals, once they had been instructed to ‘fake’ psychotic symptoms, remained under the same or more serious [End Page 177] diagnoses even when they stopped pretending and behaved completely normally. The reason for the arbitrariness of psych-diagnoses is the insufficiency of the psych-diagnostic language, including the actual diagnostic criteria, a kind of Lacanian ‘lack’ that is built into the very structure of psychodiagnostics (Ruti, 2008), and not a metaphysics behind such use of diagnostic language, whether it is essentialist or non-essentialist. Whether a particular patient actually has NPD or not in practice comes down to a consensual judgement—one that has been notoriously lacking in the history of psychiatry (Verhaeghe, 2008, pp. 71–125).Second, Pies suggests that empathy is ‘a complex, multidimensional construct comprising cognitive and affective components.’ I do not think this is a correct understanding of empathy. In fact, it is a conceptual revision of the original concept of empathy, which is one of a moral emotion (Kauppinen, 2014). What Pies calls ‘cognitive empathy,’ namely the ability to recognize and influence the emotions of others is an entirely different quality capacity that has recently been called ‘emotional intelligence’ (e.g., Conte, 2005). Many Cluster B personality disorders are characterized by an exceptionally high emotional intelligence and an almost complete lack of empathy, which allows them to use their emotional intelligence to manipulate and mistreat others. Surely such emotionally intelligent, but highly malignant strategies would not be considered ‘empathy.”Relatedly, Pies objects to Slote’s alleged view that only actions arising from factual empathy are morally justifiable. This is a ‘naturalist fallacy’ in reading Slote. The natural fallacy is a confusion between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought.’ Slote actually argues that only actions that are consistent with...

In this paper I discuss John Searle?s selective view of intentionality of mental states, and place it in the context of impairment to personal identity that occurs in mental illness. I criticize Searle?s view that intentionality characterizes some but not all mental states; I do so both on principled and on empirical grounds. I then proceed to examine the narrative theory of self, advanced by Paul Ricoeur, Marya Schechtman and others, and explore the extent to which the theory fits a more generalized view of intentionality that would apply to all mental states. This discussion is followed by a brief consideration of the way in which the modern DSM-based psychiatric diagnosis and treatment, reductively and mechanistically, dispenses with the issues of?strong ontology?, namely the life events and values that mental states might in fact reach for, even when ostensibly without reference. In this sense, DSM-inspired psychiatry is based on a Searlian view of mental states. It is contrasted with the narrative theory of self which, rather than defining madness by clusters of symptoms, seeks to understand the underlying ontology of reference by looking for both the initial script of the person?s?life narrative? and for ruptures and knots in that narrative that might give rise to madness. Finally I discuss and evaluate the perspective of personality enhancement through counseling aimed at repairing the personal narrative. nema

The paper examines the concept of individual and collective value identities based an emotionalist understanding of values. The main perspective it discusses is one where emotions are the most important practical instruments for the clarification of individual and collective values. The argument implies that moral emotions are not irrational, but have a logic of their own which can reliably pinpoint the persons’ value system; emotions are thus crucial building blocks of an ethics which is able to enhance personal and moral identity. This particular ecology of moral emotions is pivotal in crisis periods, such as the global pandemics, wars or system crashes, either economic, or political, security, diplomatic or cultural. In the current circumstances, where the already shaken individual and collective values throughout the world have been shaken by the Covid-19 pandemic, understanding identities as fundamentally couched in moral emotions may be critical to saving our cultures and our legacies of social and moral capital.

The paper explores the extent to which Epicurean ethics as a general philosophy of life can be integrated in a composite pragmatist approach to philosophical counseling. Epicureanism emerged in a historical era that was very different from the modern time and addressed a different philosophical ethos of the time. This alone makes it difficult for Epicureanism to satisfy all of the normative criteria for a modern ethics. On the other hand, the paper discusses aspects of the modern ‘external’, duty- and demand-driven ethics that may contribute to the emergence of some of the main issues for modern philosophical counseling. The author points out aspects of Epicurean ethics that are potentially powerful tools to address the issues of mood and meaning in philosophical counseling, and thus serve as a contemporary complement to a complex duty-bound, yet pragmatist view of ethics

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.

The paper investigates the compatibility of the modern technologies of warfare, specifically the use of offensive drones, with traditional military ethics and suggests that the new technologies radically change the value system of the military in ways which make large parts of the traditional military ethics inapplicable. The author suggests that Agamben’s concept of ‘effectivity’ through ‘special actions’ which mark one’s belonging to a particular community or profession is a useful conceptual strategy to explore the compatibility of drone warfare with traditional military ethics; this strategy shows mixed results at best.

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.

The paper examines the concept of individual and collective value identities based an emotionalist understanding of values. The main perspective it discusses is one where emotions are the most important practical instruments for the clarification of individual and collective values. The argument implies that moral emotions are not irrational, but have a logic of their own which can reliably pinpoint the persons’ value system; emotions are thus crucial building blocks of an ethics which is able to enhance personal and moral identity. This particular ecology of moral emotions is pivotal in crisis periods, such as the global pandemics, wars or system crashes, either economic, or political, security, diplomatic or cultural. In the current circumstances, where the already shaken individual and collective values throughout the world have been shaken by the Covid 19 pandemic, understanding identities as fundamentally couched in moral emotions may be critical to saving our cultures and our legacies of social and moral capital.

This chapter focuses on how language, and what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “language games”, are factored into everyday thinking, psychotherapeutic interventions, and the modal theory of therapy. The way in which psychological structures that are reflected in language are played out in the therapeutic narrative reveals not just the difficulties faced by the person in therapy, but also the moral assumptions and confusion that require a particular philosophical resolution in the intimate community between the therapist and client. The chapter discusses how the nature of therapeutic community as a value community influences the client’s and the therapist’s perceptions and use of language and, in turn, how the growing quality and intimacy of that community is articulated in the therapeutic narrative.

The paper deals with a perspective of Christian philosophy on artificial memory erasuse for psychotherapeutic purposes. Its central question is whether a safe and reliable technology of memory erasure, once it is available, would be acceptable from a Christian ethics point of view. The main facet of this question is related to the Christian ethics requirement of contrition for the past wrongs, which in the case of memory erasure of particulary troubling experiences and personal choices would not be possible. The paper argues that there are limits to the ethical significance of contrition in the writings of the leading Christian fathers on the theme, where excessive suffering and inability to forgive oneself for one’s actions is an impediment to the achivement of tranquility of mind and spiritual redemption, rather than a prerequisite for it. The paper thus concludes that there is no hindrance in principle from the Christian ethics point of view to pursuing a voluntary and selective memory erasure as a psychotherapeutic technique once a fully adequate technology is available.