Syllogizing LBT: Applying Formal Logic to Logic-Based Therapy

Abstract

Philosophical counselling has emerged as a contemporary movement that treats philosophical reasoning as a mode of therapeutic practice. Within this movement, Elliot D. Cohen’s Logic-Based Therapy (LBT) is the most robust attempt to resolve emotional disturbance through the application of formal reasoning. However, LBT reduces all irrational thinking to a single modus ponens schema, thereby misclassifying the logical structure of counselees’ actual inferences and locating the alleged irrationality in the propositional content of the premises rather than in the reasoning itself. This reduction overlooks the fact that beliefs, as propositional attitudes, are neither rational nor irrational; only the act of believing can be so assessed, and irrationality arises when an inference violates logical validity. In this brief paper, I argue that a classical syllogistic framework corrects this mistake. Drawing on Aristotle’s peristaseis and Boethius’s De syllogismo categorico, I outline a method for reconstructing the actual argument form underlying a counselee’s reasoning. This restores logical analysis to LBT and reveals irrationality as deriving from invalid reasoning, not falsity in propositions.