Those undertaking a course entitled “Philosophy and Counseling” face a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge of philosophical reflection is to bring some of your guiding assumptions to conscious awareness and subject them to critical consideration. The opportunity is to expand and deepen those assumptions through a strong encounter with other “assumptive worlds.” Your “others” for this course include a Jewish philosopher, a Zen master, a cosmologist, a self psychologist and your professor, each of whom attempts to raise up into language what lies beneath or behind or beyond the surface of everyday life.

Authentic philosophical reflection is interruptive because it forces people out of the habitual cycle of assuming, interpreting, acting and reacting which ordinarily constitutes everyday life. Such reflection is disturbing because it calls into question the taken-for-granted compass by means of which we navigate everyday life. Indeed, as we will see, the event which takes us to the heart of philosophy is questioning, or, more truly, being questioned. Philosophical reflection is liberating because it has the power to expand, deepen and detoxify the understandings that guide our personal and professional lives.

My intention in constructing this course was to create an experience in which you might become more deeply acquainted with the assumptions, both explicit and implicit, which are constantly guiding you and others, especially those others who enter your life in the role of “client.” My hope is not only that you might become more aware of your presuppositions, but also more capable of freeing yourself and others to an extent from the constraining and destructive role they often play in human life. The pain and joy of human beings are never simply a matter of what events are happening to them; they are also a function of how they interpret those events. And, as we will see, every interpretation is shaped by assumptions.

The metaphor of “conversation” has moved to the center of contemporary intellectual life across the disciplines as a metaphor for the discipline of interpretation theory or hermeneutics. With its multiple meanings--communication, interpretation, revelation--conversation offers a rich guiding image for our course. Your conversation partners for this course are the authors whose work we will be reading together, your instructor, your classmates and yourself. What you will discover in those conversations can enable you to have positive effects on the lives of those who seek you out as counselors as much or more than the technical knowledge and behavioral skills that are rightly expected of professional counselors.

Reading assignments for each session follow. Some of this material may stretch you as a reader. I suggest that you go through each assignment once fairly rapidly to get the gist of it, then re-read the text slowly, making specific note of points in the text that you do not understand, as well as those with which you agreed or disagreed strongly. Those questions will provide the jumping-off point for our conversations in class.

Grades for the course will be based equally on 1.) mid-term and final exams in which you will be asked to respond to a series of short-answer essay questions based on readings, presentations and class conversations; and 2.) a written reflection (10 pages, typed, double-spaced, 12 characters/inch) on the genesis, strengths and limitations of  selected aspects your assumptive world as they pertain to being a counselor. This paper is due no later than July 13th.

Required Textbooks

Martin Buber, I and Thou. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. [IT]

Thich Nhat Hanh, Cultivating the Mind of Love. Berkeley: Parallax, 1996. [CML]
 

Dates/Assignments

June

  12 Introductions, syllabus, hermeneutics

  13 Cowan, “The Sacred Game of Conversation”
     [Guest lecturer: Dr. Jan Rieveschel]

  14 IT, sections 1-8

  15 No class meeting

  19 IT, sections 9-12

  20 IT, sections 13-21

  21 IT, sections 22-29

  22 IT, sections, 38-39

  26 IT, sections 43-47

  27 IT, sections 53-55; 59-60

  28 IT, Afterword; Buber, “Healing through Meeting”

  29 Mid-term (See Study Guide)

  July

  3 CML, chapters 1-4

  4 No class

  5 CML, chapters 5-8

  6 Berry, “The New Story”; “The Viable Human”

  7 Thomas Berry lecture: “The Ecozoic Commitment”
     [7:00-8:30 p.m. Miller Hall, Room 114]

10 No class

11 CML, chapters 9-12

12 CML, chapters 13-15

13 Cowan, “Emerging in Love”

17 Study day

18 Final (See Study Guide)