Joseph Margolis

Psychotherapy & Morality: A Study of Two Concepts.

Two Concepts. By Joseph mARGOLIS, PhD. Price,

Science without unity : reconciling the human and natural sciences

1.95. Pp 174. Random House, iNC., 457 Madison Ave, New York 10022, 1966. This book renders a special kind of SERVice to the psychotherapeutic enterprise. One of its chief virtues lies in the clarity with which it reveals how psychotherapeutic models are embedded in the moral SUBSTRUCture of society and culture. The author, an analytical philosopher, makes his contribution through a logical analysis of the language and practice of professional psychotherapists (primarily the dynamic school broadly conceived), some of whom he knew while he was a senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cincinnati. His focal interest is to bring the practice and theory of psychotherapy into the arena of the philosophical framework of evaluation. His twofold sensitivity to the psychotherapists resistance to philosophic intrusion and to the theoreticians pervasive blindness to the value of philosophical principles spur him to note that, when professionals reflect upon their activity, they tend toward philosophical generalization themselves (and thereby become amateurs, as Waelder1 has so succinctly pointed out). The philosopher offers the function of a Socratic midwife: to clarify the latent philo¬ sophical assumptions and moral values within which the professional psychother¬ apist works by virtue of his relationship to the larger society and culture in which he functions. His basic assumption is that the practice of psychotherapy is a form of conduct and is, therefore, in the purview of the moral. His analysis reveals a double code of moral¬ ity, that of the profession and that of socie¬ ty. The boundaries of the moral are the right (justice and duty) and the good (hap¬ piness and well-being). There is no conflict between the good and the aim of therapy, but there is conflict between the professions and societys morality at the point of justice and duty. To the question, How it is possible to resolve conflicts between therapeutic and moral values? the author responds with the thesis that moral obligations define the highest values of society; therefore, thera¬ peutic values are always subordinate to our moral obligations. While these distinctions

The Reasonableness of Relativism

Preface Acknowledgements Prologue: A Sense of the Issue Introduction. Preview and Review 1. Truth and Relativism 2. Relativism and the Lebenswelt Part I. Minds without Substance 3. Minds, Selves, and Persons 4. Self and World 5. Top-down and Bottom-up Strategies 6. Cognition, Representation, and Information 7. Intentionality, Institutions, and Human Nature Part II. Science without Unity 8. Science as a Human Undertaking 9. The Structures of Functional Properties 10. Emergence and the Unity of Science 11. Context, History, and the Human Condition 12. The Society of Man.

Reasons and Persons.

I have for some time defended a form of relativism which, though formulated explicitly in the context of certain aesthetic concerns (chiefly, regarding the interpretation and appreciation of artworks), I suggested could be applied without much adjustment to a wide variety of judgments and conceptual schemes for instance, moral judgments, ontological analyses of what there is, characterizations and interpretations of human history and human action, and explanatory theories of intentionally specified phenomena. There are ways of applying relativism promisingly even to those domains that have been most stubbornly extensional or have claimed apodictic certainty and universal scope for instance, regarding the phenomena and causal laws of the physical sciences, and transcendental arguments. These and other applications appear reasonable at least to the extent that we cannot provide a compelling basis for demarcating realist and idealist accounts of the sciencesI or for proposing a criterion of the analytic/synthetic distinction among natural languages or for eliminating historicist constraints on theory and inquiry. Now, Michael Wreen has charged that my theory, a moderate or robust relativism: (A) is not consistent, (B) is not moderate, and (C) entails skepticism. I am grateful to Wreen for an occasion to clarify the sense in which none of these charges may be made to stick hence, that relativism is a conceptually respectable option that fits our intuitions rather neatly in a variety of contexts

Describing and Interpreting Works of Art

This book challenges, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity. The author claims that we have a false view of our own nature; that it is often rational to act against our own best interests; that most of us have moral views that are directly self-defeating; and that, when we consider future generations the conclusions will often be disturbing. He concludes that moral non-religious moral philosophy is a young subject, with a promising but unpredictable future.