Vol VI, No. 1, 2006 8

6.1

Overview to the special edition

There are many ways to think of philosophy such as love of knowledge, learning how arguments hold together, whether propositions are morally sound, and that philosophy can be grounded in either mathematics or language. While Whitehead once quipped that all Western philosophy was nothing more than a footnote to that which already had been addressed by Plato, there do seem to be some new ways of constructing and evaluating arguments.

Rationality and REBT

This paper looks at the logical background to Ellis’s use of ‘rational’ and ‘rationality’, and why this use is so relevant to the importance of REBT. It explores two fundamental and apparently contrasting usages, referred to here as disciplinary and emancipatory rationality (discrat and emanrat), and their interplay in REBT.

Albert Ellis on evaluating selves

An important aspect of Ellis’s theory and practice of therapy is the promotion of self- acceptance in the client. This is accomplished by getting the client to give up all self-evaluation. Ellis appears to give three different rationales for this practice/theory: 1) the selves are functions, 2) that selves are ontologically incapable of taking value-predicates, and 3) that it is therapeutically necessary to forswear self-evaluations. It is argued that Ellis needs a rationale for rejecting all self-evaluation, but on his own principles none of the three available to him works. Thus his psychotherapy fails a crucial test of theory adequacy: consistency. If RET is to became a rational system, a way must be found to eschew self-evaluation in terms of traits and behavior without forswearing all self-evaluation. For this purpose the theory needs to be supplemented with some plausible account of human dignity or value, in which clients can be rationally convinced that they share, independently of the value of their traits and behavior.

Ethics disguised: philosophical-scientific-academic overview in Romania

The present article presents a Philosophical-Scientific-Academic overview in Romania at the following levels:

1. Public visibility and the obliteration of abstraction in favor of being newsworthy;
2. Truth and / or Rating;
3. The culture of disguise and post-communist evasiveness.

At the end of the article, conclusions and implications are discussed.

The congruence of the philosophy of rational emotive behavior therapy within the philosophy of mainstream Christianity

This paper attempts to demonstrate that the philosophy of REBT and the philosophy of Christianity are congruent. Both seek to transform the individual who is experiencing pain, alienation, self-defeating behaviors into a person with a radically new and liberating philosophy of life, or newly uncovered and self-accepted being. Moreover, the key to this transformation is a change of fundamental beliefs away from dogmatic demandingness, awfulizing, low frustration tolerance, and self and other-downing toward an unconditional acceptance of the self, others, the world, and life.

Logotherapy-enhanced REBT: an integration of discovery and reason

A close review of Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy and Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) demonstrates remarkable similarities between these two systems of psychotherapy. An integrated Logotherapy-enhanced REBT is examined in respect to cognitions, emotions, and the reduction of rumination. Its unique contribution is to balancing discovery of meaning with the use of reason during the process of psychotherapy. Conclusions are drawn, limitations are discussed, and future recommendations are outlined.

Closing remarks to the special issue: cognitive behavioral therapy in search of itself

As sciences become more mature, they tend to review many of their philosophical assumptions, which were previously ignored due to demands for scientific rigor. This reevaluation is a kind of “search for meaning” beyond the empirical data the science might have generated by rigorous research. It is an interesting phenomenon, because it represents a search for a deeper understanding of what one chose to negate in the first place.

The faster you move the longer you live – a test of rational emotive behavior therapy?

When testing a potentially influential theory one usually makes sure to employ the best tests in order to receive strait answers. Surprisingly however, some tests are designed to fail from the very beginning, before implementation, as: (1) they do not in fact examine the theory that is supposed to be investigated and/or (2) they investigate the theory using an inappropriate methodology. In rigorous sciences, situations of this kind are limited because the scientific community does not allow such studies published or run. Unfortunately, this is often not the case for psychology. In this article we present how rational-emotive & cognitive-behavioral therapy has been “distorted” by inappropriate “tests” of its hypotheses. Conclusion and implications for future research are discussed.