Principles of CBT

1. Moods are created by thoughts.

2.  Bad moods are created by negative thoughts.

3. Negative thoughts result from irrational thinking.

Here are some fallacies that indicate irrational thinking, albeit not the ones typically discussed in CBT literature.

Survivorship bias: overestimating one's chance of success based on the success of persons who have passed a selection process while ignoring the failure of those who did not.

Swimmer's body illusion: confusing the factor of selection with the result, for example concluding swimmers have great bodies because they swim, rather than concluding that swimmers swim because they have bodies fit for it.

Clustering illusion: mistaking random data for patterns.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Being-in, Disposedness pp. 169-82, 389-96

 All right, I can dig it. We're always in a mood or other.

But anxiety is (one of?) the most basic moods? I see what he means. He's talking about that feeling we have when we stop and reflect on the fact that nothing's grounding our existence. Existential anxiety.

We're about to get to his weird stuff. He thinks by facing up to this anxiety, we get authentic.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The One pp. 149-68

 Heidegger doesn't know where his loyalties lie. Is he a philosophical anthropologist or an existentialist?

Dasein is primarily das Man, he writes. One is what one does, and the one is any one, every one.

But this state of affairs is terrible, he thinks, because being any one robs us of authenticity.

I'm not saying Heidegger is wrong. In fact, I don't think he is. Truth be told, I don't even think he's wrong in moving from this descriptive claim to an evaluative claim.

This is the way things are, and from one point of view, it kind of sucks.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Spatiality pp. 134-48

This section of Being and Time is easy enough to understand. Our most basic, most immediate and familiar understanding of space and spatial orientation is relative to our involvement in the world. There's the equipment in front of me and at my periphery. There are the things behind me, and I can think about them, but essentially for Dasein, it's out of sight, out of mind. In an objective sense, there are some piece of equipment I'm making use of which are close to me but which I take for granted and which in some respects seem not even there despite their objective spatiality. My eyeglasses, for instance. They're on the bridge of my nose, but I take them for granted. My laptop and my typing hands seem more immediate to me than my eyeglasses. That's how much I take the function of the glasses for granted.

All well and good, I think, but as usual, the trouble for Heidegger is when he or the Heideggerians try to draw deep ontological conclusions from this everyday existential phenomenology. A Heideggerian might say that this understanding of space and spatiality is more "primordial" but that way of talking is just to privilege the phenomenological reading of space over a scientific understanding. I don't see a need for such privileging. That's a kind of prejudice, nothing more.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The Critique of Descartes pp. 122-34

 As much as I'm a fan of Heidegger and his project in Being and Time, I think he's critique of Descartes is off the mark, that is, outside of the broad critique that anyone can make of him.

First, the broad critique. Yes, indeed, the world is not divided into mind stuff and matter stuff. Now someone who subscribes to naturalistic inquiry will tell a certain kind of story about how the world is carved up and it won't be Heidegger's but let's leave it there. That is, in general, the broad critique.

Heidegger's specific critique of Descartes is that Descartes got us off on the wrong foot in his conception of us as self-possessed subjects over against objects. I'm no great lover of Descartes but this is unfair to Descartes. Descartes was not trying to capture our everyday phenomenological experience when constructing his dualism or conceiving of the world as a world of objects in view of subjects. He was doing two other things.

First, Descartes was trying to arrive at what's really real. Right or wrong, he thought how could do this from armchair speculation beginning with some basic assumptions and a simple kind of puzzle. The puzzle was, given the flux of all these worldly phenomena, what bit of the phenomena is beyond doubt? What couldn't be doubted, he concluded, was that he was a certain kind of perceiving being, one he called a "thinking thing." All right, and from there he got all his derivations.

Another thing Descartes was doing, especially after building up his philosophy from this epistemological foundation had to do with a number of tacit assumptions he was operating under at the time, a kind of mechanical philosophy by which everything in the world seemed to move through pushing and pulling. Well, in many respects this presents another kind of puzzle. If every bit of physics is a matter of pushing and pulling, how do we account for abstract stuff like ideas or intentions and a host of other mental phenomena that do not seem to have these push-pull properties? Another way Descartes fills out his understanding of ontology, then, is to conclude that the sciences deal with the push-pull stuff of matter, but the mind is very special because it doesn't have this mechanical nature.

What Descartes did not foresee and later thinkers dead is that he need not have posited nonmaterial phenomena, mind-stuff, rather he should have broadened his understand of what counted for material or physical, and that includes a broader category of stuff than that which has to do with contact mechanics.

The fact that Heidegger has Descartes saying that being a human is a matter of us just staring at stuff is laughable. It's a strawman. Descartes said no such thing and he has left us no such legacy. Never did.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: The Worldhood of the World pp. 102-22

World is what we colloquially call context. Equipment is all the stuff around us. Heidegger uses the word equipment to point up the fact that most of the things in our environment have an instrumental function. As I write this, I have a paperback copy of Being and Time resting on my belly, and though I'm not using it to read, it is a thing at-hand, ready to be used, whether to read or swat a mosquito.

Our world is already in advance full of equipment imbued with significance, and we take this environment and these things mostly for granted. That's our nature. Only when the stuff malfunctions do I tend to take notice.

Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time: Being-in-the-world pp. 78-102

A digression, because many of these pages are boring.

Heidegger investigates the obvious and unnoticed on the one hand and the disguised on the other. These are two different modes of hermeneutic investigation: the hermeneutics of everydayness and the hermeneutics of suspicion. The latter is far more interesting.

A hermeneutics of suspicion uncovers disguised truths. This is what Marx is up to in Capital, Freud in Interpretation of Dreams, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and so on, Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, and Heidegger in Division II of Being and Time, in his appeal to our call to conscience.