The American movie, “Peaceful Warrior” (2006), starring Scott Mechlowicz and Nick Nolte, is a story about an outstanding athlete’s perplexities and anxieties. The main character in the movie, Dan Millman, aggressively pushes his performance in order to become a top athlete. As a result, he develops feelings of perplexity and anxiety, and suffers daily from these problems, leading to insomnia. The other character in the movie, Socrates, who works at a gas station, is like a philosopher. Socrates not only helps (...) others to feel better, he can also help himself; in other words, he provides philosophical counseling services. In this paper, I utilize a combination of Buddhist philosophy and Logic-based Therapy (LBT) to interpret and analyze scenarios from this Movie, hoping to provide materials for philosophical counseling. The Buddhist philosophy I use includes the Ch’an philosophies of attachment, contemplation, greed, animosity, ignorance, non-duality, and meditation. The Five Steps of Logic-Based Therapy I incorporate include: (1) identifying the counsel­ee’s emotional reasoning; (2) identifying any irrational premises; (3) refuting any irrational premises; (4) finding antidotes to the refuted premises; and (5) exercising willpower in overcoming cognitive dissonance. There are six aspects that I address in this paper. The first is the anxieties of the Movie’s main character, Dan. The second is the philosophical counseling approach attained by combining Ch’an philosophy and Logic-based Therapy. The third is “knowing the dissatisfactions,” i.e. the process of finding one’s emotional reasoning/irrational premises. The fourth is “terminating the causes (of the dissatisfactions),” i.e. refuting the irrational premises. The fifth is “cultivating the path,” i.e. finding an antidote to the refuted premises. And the sixth aspect is “realizing the cessation (awakening),” i.e., exercising willpower in overcoming cognitive dissonance. (shrink)

Increasingly skillful forgery of Marxism and increasingly skillful disguise of various antimaterialist theories as Marxism are the characteristics of modern revisionism in political economy, tactics, and general philosophy ." In this remark, Lenin unmistakably pointed out the old tricks of the various revisionists who frenziedly attacked Marxism. In philosophy, veteran revisionists such as Bernstein and his ilk who followed on the tail of bourgeois professors of philosophy called for "return to Kant," integration of Marxism with Kantianism, and replenishment of Marxism (...) with Kantianism. Russian revisionists such as Bogdanov and his ilk advocated integration of Marxism with Machism and of socialism with religion and replenishment of Marxism with Machism. In short, they disguised various idealist theories as Marxist philosophy and used these theories to "replenish" or supersede Marxist philosophy while at the same time saying that this was the development of Marxist philosophy. (shrink)

To give the necessary affirmation to the historical role played by the Legalists and to study and analyze the Legalists' writings from the Marxist point of view is a major task on the ideological front called for by the deepening of the Campaign to Criticize Lin Piao and Confucius. Han Fei was an outstanding representative of the Legalists of the late Warring States period. He summed up the experience, both positive and negative, of the newly emerging landlord class in the (...) process of instituting reform, and he criticized the reactionary Confucianism. He thus fully and theoretically formed a comprehensive system of Legalist thought which served as a direct theoretical preparation for the establishment of a unified feudal state under a centralized authority. The "Wu Tu" is representative of the more than one hundred thousand words of Han Fei's writings. This important political essay made a revolutionary criticism of the reactionary ideology hindering the progress of the newly emerging landlord class and outlined a theoretical program by which the landlord class could exercise an all-round dictatorship over the slave-owning class. Acquiring a clear understanding about this will help us see further through the ultra-Right essence of Lin Piao's practice of honoring Confucius and opposing Legalism. (shrink)