Too many of the SPI Fellows to list have founded or take an executive role in an intellectual or political organization. Here are two, with more to be featured in future articles!
Dr. Salih (left) doing field work
SPI Fellow Sarbagh Salih is the founder of Hataw, an NGO in Kurdistan that helps people who were forced to move to cities to return to their villages to work in the fields. She is a board member of Nature Iraq and the Sakran-Halgurd National Park, and a member of the committee of the Kurdistan National Herbarium.
She is also President of the Kurdistan Botanical Foundation, which recently finished a botanical survey of the Azmer-Goizha mountain in Iraqi Kurdistan, a two-year effort that collected specimens of more than 1,000 species. The group also replants rare and endemic plant species in different areas in Kurdistan. She is raising money to fund a Kurdistan National Herbarium at the University of Sulaimani and to create a Botanical Garden in one of the largest parks in the Middle East, Hawari Shar Park.
She recently wrote a contribution to the Kurdistan Tour Guide 2015-2016, the first comprehensive travel book for Kurdistan. She is also the wife of Dr. Batham Ahmed Salih, the former Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Deputy PM for Iraq, and the founder of the American University for Iraq. They live in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.
SPI Fellow Elliot D. Cohen is one of the principal founders of philosophical counseling in the United States. He is co-founder and Executive Director of the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA), and President of the Institute of Critical Thinking. He is also founder and editor of International Journal of Applied Philosophy and International Journal of Philosophical Practice.
How does philosophy become an applied field? He answers in his recent essay, What Else Can You Do With Philosophy Besides Teach? published in the International Journal of Philosophical Practice that one thing is to give philosophical counseling, a form of mental health counseling. In September he wrote on this topic in Using Logic-Based Therapy to Address Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and in November gave a keynote address, with his wife Dr. Gale Cohen, at the International Conference on Philosophical Counseling & Humanities Therapy in Taipei, Taiwan.
In February┬áhe launches his new book,┬áLogic-Based Therapy and Everyday Emotions: A Case-Based Approach, where he discusses how philosophy is applied to counseling, and explains Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), a six-step method to counseling that he invented. It’s a follow-up to his 2013 book,┬áTheory and Practice of Logic-based Therapy: Integrating Critical Thinking and Philosophy into Psychotherapy.