Practical Wisdom, Extended Rationality, and Human Agency

Shaun Gallagher Moral Agency , Self - Consciousness , and Practical Wisdom 1

This paper argues that self-consciousness and moral agency depend crucially on both embodied and social aspects of human existence, and that the capacity for practical wisdom, phronesis, is central to moral personhood. The nature of practical wisdom is elucidated by drawing on rival analyses of expertise. Although ethical expertise and practical wisdom differ importantly, they are alike in that...

The Rationality of Educating for Wisdom STANOVICH EDUCATING FOR WISDOM

Sternberg’s call for an educational focus on teaching wisdom can be viewed as part of a nascent trend to reorient educational psychology away from exclusive focus on the so-called algorithmic level of analysis. The thrust of his research program on wisdom, like those emphasizing rationality as a critical construct in educational psychology, is on aspects of cognition heretofore backgrounded: th...

Practical Reasoning and Rationality

Healthy Skepticism and Practical Wisdom

This paper explores and articulates an alternative to the two main approaches that have come to predominate in contemporary philosophical discussions of skepticism. These we may call the ̳Foil Approach‘ and the ̳Bypass Approach‘ respectively. On the Foil Approach, skepticism is treated as a problem to be solved, or challenge to be met, or threat to be parried; skepticism‘s value, insofar as it ...

Medicine as practical wisdom (phronesis)

Modern medicine faces fundamental challenges that various approaches to the philosophy of medicine have tried to address. One of these approaches is based on the ancient concept of phronesis. This paper investigates whether this concept can be used as a moral basis for the challenges facing modern medicine and, in particular, analyses phronesis as it is applied in the works of Pellegrino and Th...