A controversial new talk therapy, which takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and faulty logic.

Do I hear the laughter of one Ludwig Wittgenstein in the distance?

The world's most successful marketer of philosophical counseling is Lou Marinoff, a tenured philosophy professor at City College of New York.

His books, The Big Questions: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life and
Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems (translated into over 20 languages), have become international best sellers and made him wealthy.

He's currently embroiled in a lawsuit in federal court against his own university, which has banned him from offering therapy on campus while liability questions remain unsettled.

Marinoff believes that Americans are tired of psychologists dwelling on our every painful feeling, and psychiatrists prescribing a new drug every time we feel confused.

He thinks most of our problems aren't even emotional or chemical to begin with - they're philosophical.

Philosophical counseling is proving to be enormously lucrative for its leading practitioners.

For example, Tom Morris, a former Notre Dame professor, charges I.B.M. and General Electric $30,000 an hour for his lecture on "The 7 C's of Success," distilled from Cicero and Spinoza, Montaigne and Aeschylus.

Marinoff and other practitioners believe we all have a philosophy of life, whether we know it or not, and that we can benefit from identifying that philosophy.

bookofjoe is in full agreement with this argument.