Philosophical Counseling: Using Philosophy to Address Life’s Challenges

Everyone confronts questions about personal meaning and purpose, family and relationship conflicts, work-related frustrations, midlife crises, life-altering health problems, hard choices, and many more challenges in daily living. Can philosophy help with any of these issues? Advocates of “philosophical counseling” argue it can. Philosophical counseling is the application of philosophical methods, concepts, theories, arguments, and insights to concerns that are traditionally addressed by psychology-based counseling. This essay describes a leading approach to philosophical counseling, known as Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), that has been developed and used since the 1980s.