[lit-ideas] Re: Wisdom Project
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:10:06 -0230
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
> > Know-how? Didn't Aristotle say something like that? Envisioning wisdom
> > as know-how in the larger sense that comprehends a well-lived life? Dr.
> > Paul, give us a hand here.
>
> For Aristotle there isn't just something called Wisdom. Theoretical
> wisdom and practical wisdom are intellectual virtues (marks of
> excellence in the one who has them, apart from the moral virtues).
> Theoretical wisdom deals with first principles, with the
> unchanging?things that we are constrained by but do not choose or
> deliberate about.
WO: Two small questions:
1) Is practical wisdom really comprehended by A as being separate from moral
virtue? (I use the term "moral" here only because RP does. I believe the more
accurate translations of A's ethics refrain from using the term, preferring
instead "virtues of character" or similar locutions. "Morality," as we
understand it today was not something A would accept as a cogent notion.)
2) Does A claim that the objects of theoretical reason are not the kinds of
things we choose or deliberate about, or does he make the transcendental claim
that such objects CANNOT be the objects of choice and deliberation?
Walter O
MUN
> Practical wisdom is the knowledge of practical things:
> how to achieve what we need or want or ought to do. The phronimous?the
> 'practically wise man'?is a paradigm of moral virtue but he is not a
> sage dispensing great truths from the mountain top. Such a conception of
> wisdom would have been entirely foreign to Aristotle.
>
> 'Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximander, and men like these knew many things
> that were difficult, admirable, even divine?but useless; for it was not
> human goods that they sought.'
>
> I said that theoretical wisdom deals with things about which we don't
> deliberate; but we do reflect on and contemplate them, when we engage in
> theoria.
>
> Robert Paul
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