Special issue: counseling and philosophy with an emphasis on values.(Editorial)

Introduction to the Special Issue

The counseling literature contains a plethora of information about how to understand and help various types of clients. The guidance provided by this literature is invaluable to counseling practitioners, who often spend their days confronting one challenging client problem after another. Articles and books about counseling, however, are decidedly slanted toward practice issues and are seldom devoted to a critical appraisal of the foundational paradigms that support particular values, techniques, and treatment modalities. It was this observation that served as the impetus for the idea of a special issue devoted to philosophical issues in counseling.

Philosophy was chosen as a theme for the special issue because philosophical modes of inquiry are uniquely suited for the task of critically appraising the foundational assumptions of the counseling profession. Moreover, the introduction of philosophical ideas into the counseling realm has a history of being extraordinarily generative. For example, the seemingly esoteric philosophical question, "How can we acquire accurate knowledge about the world beyond our own minds?" has served as an ideological launching pad for the postmodernist movement and the various therapeutic systems that have been derived from it, such as solution-focused (Guterman, 2006) and narrative (White & Epston, 1990) approaches to counseling. Philosophical ideas have also been a vital force in the construction of the ethical foundations of counseling practice.

Philosophical reflection, then, should be a regular part of the ongoing development of the counseling profession. If continual self-examination is not conducted, the profession is at risk for floating aimlessly on a sea of techniques, competencies, and reimbursement pressures, with no foundational direction to guide it. Philosophical inquiry has a distinctive way of getting to the heart of matters, thereby providing the type of clarification and generative thought that is necessary to guide the counseling profession to the actualization of its potential.

When the call for papers was first announced for the special issue, I was not sure what to expect. I was concerned that the relative lack of philosophical reflection in the counseling literature meant that there were few counselors who had an interest in philosophical thought. I was reassured to find that my concern was completely misguided. There were a multitude of excellent, thoughtful, and scholarly submissions to the special issue. I take this as a sign that there is a strong philosophical underground in the counseling profession that has gone ...