ABSTRACT
Social critics, epistemologists and depressed or unhappy people all have tendencies to worry about therapeutic enlightenment. What accounts for their worries is not least the suspicion that they are being fed dogma or pseudoscience in the name of enlightenment. Perhaps what is worrying is not that therapists and their ilk seek to erect themselves as authorities over conduct-for as we saw, there is a long tradition of that-so much as the tendency to claim legitimacy for therapeutic kinds of authority from intellectual doctrines about the nature of humans. It is the fact that therapeutic enlightenment often entails an intellectual claim for a moral evaluation of conduct that is worrying.
