A reasoned and urgent call to embrace and protect the essential human quality that has been drummed out of our lives: wisdom. In their provocative new book, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe explore the insights essential to leading satisfying lives. Encouraging individuals to focus on their own personal intelligence and integrity rather than simply navigating the rules and incentives established by others, Practical Wisdom outlines how to identify and cultivate our own innate wisdom in our daily lives.
Bryn Mawr Commentaries provide clear, concise, accurate, and consistent support for students making the transition from introductory and intermediate texts to the direct experience of ancient Greek and Latin literature. They assume that the student will know the basics of grammar and vocabulary and then provide the specific grammatical and lexical notes that a student requires to begin the task of interpretation. Hackett Publishing Company is the exclusive distributor of the Bryn Mawr Commentaries in North America, the United Kingdom, and Europe.
The Heart of Judgment explores the nature, historical significance, and continuing relevance of practical wisdom. Primarily a work in moral and political thought, it also relies extensively on research in cognitive neuroscience to confirm and extend our understanding of the faculty of judgment. Ever since the ancient Greeks first discussed practical wisdom, the faculty of judgment has been an important topic for philosophers and political theorists. It remains one of the virtues most demanded of our public officials. The greater the liberties and responsibilities accorded to citizens in democratic regimes, the more the health and welfare of society rest upon their exercise of good judgment. While giving full credit to the roles played by reason and deliberation in good judgment, the book underlines the central importance of intuition, emotion, and worldly experience.
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics had a profound influence on generations of later philosophers, not only in the ancient era but also in the medieval period and beyond. In this book, Anthony Celano explores how medieval authors recast Aristotle's Ethics according to their own moral ideals. He argues that the moral standard for the Ethics is a human one, which is based upon the ethical tradition and the best practices of a given society. In the Middle Ages, this human standard was replaced by one that is universally applicable, since its foundation is eternal immutable divine law. Celano resolves the conflicting accounts of happiness in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, demonstrates the importance of the virtue of phronesis (practical wisdom), and shows how the medieval view of moral reasoning alters Aristotle's concept of moral wisdom.
Featuring original essays from leading scholars in philosophy and psychology, this volume investigates and rethinks the role of practical wisdom in light of the most recent developments in virtue theory and moral, social and developmental psychology. The concept of phronesis has long held a prominent place in the development of Aristotelian virtue ethics and moral education. However, the nature and development of phronesis is still in need of investigation, especially because of the new insights that in recent years have come from both philosophy and science. The essays in this volume contribute to the debate about practical wisdom by elucidating its role in empirical psychology and advancing important new research questions. They address various topics related to practical wisdom and its development, including honesty, ecocentric phronesis, social cognitive theory, practical wisdom in limited-information contexts, Whole Trait Theory, skill models, the reciprocity of virtue, and challenges from situationism. Practical Wisdom will interest researchers and advanced students working in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and moral education.
Phronesis is the Aristotelian notion of practical wisdom. In this collected series, phronesis is explored as an alternate way of considering professional knowledge. In the present context dominated by technical rationalities and instrumentalist approaches, a re-examination of the concept of phronesis offers a fundamental re-visioning of the educational aims in professional schools and continuing professional education programs. This book originated from a conversation amongst an interdisciplinary group of scholars from education, health, philosophy, and sociology, who share concerns that something of fundamental importance – of moral signi?cance – is missing from the vision of what it means to be a professional. The contributors consider the ways in which phronesis offers a generative possibility for reconsidering the professional knowledge of practitioners. The question at the centre of this inquiry is: “If we take phronesis seriously as an organising framework for professional knowledge, what are the implications for professional education and practice?” A multiplicity of understandings emerge as to what is meant by phronesis and how it might be reinterpreted, understood, applied, and extended in a world radically different to that of the progenitor of the term, Aristotle. For those concerned with professional life this is a conversation not to be missed.
In this richly collaborative work, five distinguished scholars examine the oft-neglected embodied practical wisdom that is essential for true theological understanding and faithful Christian living. After first showing what Christian practical wisdom is and does in several real-life situations, the authors tell why such practical wisdom matters and how it operates, exploring reasons behind its decline in both the academy and the church and setting forth constructive cases for its renewal.
The current financial and on-going ecological crises have taught us that without practical wisdom, business, organisations and leadership cannot be sustainable. In response to this situation, the Handbook of Practical Wisdom presents a critically informed understanding of wise practices, contributing to more integrative organizational and leadership studies and practice. The focus on integration emphasises the interdependencies of practical wisdom in relation to members, groups and cultures of organisations in their socio-cultural spheres. Wisdom has long slipped from the scholarly map, and so this handbook provides revived and new mappings for today and the future. Seeking to actualize creative potentials of practical wisdom, this book and series aspires to contribute to the contemporary odysseys and quests for orientation in organisation and management research and practice. Wisdom research, as presented in this book, provides bridges to underestimated, neglected or forgotten knowledge and offers transformative passages between Scylla - the rocks of dogmatic modernity - and Charybdis - the whirlpool of dispersed post-modernity. Practical wisdom allows for a better equipped and more experiential and reflexive journey and fosters the art of mindful travelling, beyond a reactive, moralizing sentimentalism. Accordingly, this handbook serves as a medium for reassessing and rearticulating more responsible ways of ‘praxis’ in the field of organization and management. In this spirit, each chapter opens a space for dialogue and debate, inviting further inquiries, conversations and explorations by and among its readers: students, academics and practitioners.
In Aristotle on Practical Truth, C.M.M. Olfert gives the first book-length treatment of Aristotle's notion of practical truth. The book covers the origins of practical truth in Plato's philosophy; practical truth's role in practical reasoning; its contributions to motivation and action; and its implications for ethical development.
Despite the growing attention towards the importance of practical wisdom in business today, little research has been done about the concept of practical wisdom in the Indigenous, Asian and Middle-Eastern traditions. Contemporary studies of wisdom are dominated by the philosophical traditions of Western thought, which is based on the ancient Greek concepts of wisdom. Much less is known about how practical wisdom, as illuminated by these other traditions, can be implemented in today’s organizational settings. This book thus fills an important gap in understanding wisdom and how it is applied in a poly-cultural world. Wisdom is culturally bound. Wisdom is poly-cultural and interweaves individuality and communality. Practical wisdom is inextricably connected to many needs of contemporary personal and professional life. Moreover, the increasingly growing poly-culturality around the world requires a better understanding of how practical wisdom is understood in different cultures and traditions. Accordingly, there is a need for a) poly-cultural understanding of the concept of wisdom and b) the role of practical wisdom in a world crying out for wisdom. This book underlines the importance of developing a poly-cultural and interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of practical wisdom in today’s complex environment. The book offers significant insight into the implications of the non-Western traditions of wisdom and how such an understanding of the non-Western traditions can help us better and more critically understand and appropriately address new multi-faceted complex emerging phenomena. While the Western traditions offer valuable insight into the implication of wisdom in modern life, an integrated view that brings together the Western and non-Western traditions can provide a more critical and practical insight into how to apply practical wisdom in a contemporary poly-cultural environment.
