Human Wisdom The Aftermath of Human Knowledge

Reaching understanding is one of our central epistemic goals, dictated by our important motivational epistemic virtue, namely inquisitiveness about the way things hang together. Understanding of humanly important causal dependencies is also the basic factual-theoretic ingredient of wisdom, on the anthropocentric view proposed in the paper. It appears at two-levels. At the first-level of immediate, spontaneous wisdom it is paired with practical knowledge and motivation (phronesis), and encompasses understanding of oneself (a distinct level of self-knowledge having to do with one’s dispositions- capacities, vulnerabilities, and ways of reacting), of other people, of possibilities of meaningful life and of relevant courses of events. It is partly resistant to skeptical scenarios, but not completely. On the second and reflective level, understanding helps fuller holistic integration of one’s first-order practical and factual-theoretic knowledge and motivation, thus minimizing potential and actual conflicts between all these components. It also participates in the reflective control, whose exercise is needed for full reflective wisdom, the crucial epistemic-practical virtue or human excellence.

2016

Wisdom is associated with old age from common sense. This is based on ancient traditions linked to sacred texts, key principles and narratives since the beginnings of civilizations. From a psycho-gerontological point of view, the hypothesis holds that skills would not decline with age; in fact, they would develop throughout the course of life and reach its peak in late adulthood and old age, leading to higher forms of knowledge. In the last decades of the twentieth century, psychology has become interested in wisdom in line with the principles of Positive Psychology and Psycho-gerontology. Wisdom can be considered as a degree of human development in its higher forms, both in its cognitive and affectiveemotional side, or even as a higher degree of integration of both aspects. The importance of each component has generated debates among theorists. Several authors have characterized wisdom considering it as a skill linked to solving problems of human life; a sort of pragmatics of life....

This is a pre-proofs version of a paper forthcoming in Acta Analytica. I argue that a necessary condition for being wise is understanding how to live well. The condition, by requiring understanding rather than a wide variety of justified beliefs or knowledge, as Ryan and Whitcomb respectively require, yields the desirable result that being wise is compatible with having some false beliefs but not just any false beliefs about how to live well – regardless of whether those beliefs are justified or not. In arguing for understanding how to live well as a necessary condition for wisdom, I reject the view, proposed by both Ryan and Whitcomb, that subjects such as chemistry lie within the domain of wisdom. I show that the argued for condition yields the desirable result that being wise is not a common achievement, but that it is not something that can only plausibly be achieved in the modern era.

Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2023

What is the nature and structure of phronesis or practical wisdom? According to the view widely held by philosophers and psychologists, a person S is wise if and only if S knows how to live well. Given this view of practical wisdom, the guiding question is this: What exactly is "knowing how to live well"? It seems that no one has a clear idea of how to answer this simple but fundamental question. This paper explores knowing how to live well (or "life know-how") by showing how its nature and structure can be understood through contemporary epistemology of knowledge-how. I will achieve this by doing the following. In Section I, I highlight the two as-yet unanswered "integration questions" about life know-how. In Section II, I explain why the epistemology of knowledge-how has good potential to address the integration questions. In Sections III and IV, I construct two positions-intellectualism and anti-intellectualism-for the epistemology of life know-how and show how they address the two integration questions. In Section V, I show how the epistemology of life know-how established in the previous sections can be used in the philosophy of wisdom and the psychology of wisdom.

Current Psychology, 2022

Narrowing the debate about the meaning of wisdom requires two different understandings of wisdom. (a) As action or behaviour, wisdom refers to well-motivated actors achieving an altruistic outcome by creatively and successfully solving problems. (b) As a psychological trait, wisdom refers to a global psychological quality that engages intellectual ability, prior knowledge and experience in a way that integrates virtue and wit, and is acquired through life experience and continued practice. Thus, we propose a two-dimensional theory of wisdom that integrates virtue and wit. Wisdom can be further divided into "humane wisdom" and "natural wisdom" according to the types of capability required. At the same time, we propose that wisdom classification should integrate the views of Sternberg and Wang and be divided into three types: domain-specific wisdom, domain-general wisdom, and omniscient/ overall wisdom. We then discuss three pressing questions about wisdom, and consider five issues important to the future of wisdom research in psychology.

2022

This book of wisdom concerns wisdom as practice that is influenced by Pierre Hadot who is a French Scholar of Ancient Philosophy. That wisdom is a practice on how to solve life's problems. This book is a self-help book on how to change one's attitude, but also how how to live a life of self-help and self-care. This book aims at being an scholarly book, but also a self-help book, that aims at using philosophy as a means of self-help. It is not so much an academic book, but a book that should appeal to a common audience. All self-help books aim at the assumption that one's life is in their control, but not only that, but that life's problems is something that can be overcome. This book of wisdom concerns philosophy as an expression of a way of life, as the application of truth in everyday life, instead of wisdom as truth in the traditional Western "philosophical" sense of the word. That some truths are useless and therefore not considered wise. I believed in the Chinese philosophical sense of word and also the Indian sense of the word: wisdom as practice. As an expression of philosophy to deal with problems of everyday life and not necessarily philosophy as the examined life. The Chinese defined philosophy as the: "way", and not necessarily wisdom as: "truth". Some Western philosophy saw philosophy as a way of life, but also a practical exercise that can help people overcome life's problems.

2015

What is it that makes someone wise, or one person wiser than another? I argue that wisdom consists in knowledge of how to live well, and that this knowledge of how to live well is constituted by various further kinds of knowledge. One concern for this view is that knowledge is not needed for wisdom but rather some state short of knowledge, such as having rational or justified beliefs about various topics. Another concern is that the emphasis on knowing how to live well fails to do justice to the ancient tradition of "theoretical wisdom." I address both of these concerns in filling out the account.

2015

The paper is a reflection on the role of practical wisdom in ethics. By explaining and trying to understand the essence of practical wisdom, the author has endeavoured to determine whether it can be treated as a central ethical category, and if so, then why. In these analyses, author has referred to the concept of Aristotle, universally acknowledged as the classical one. Characterizing and describing that concept, she tries to answer three questions: 1) What is practical wisdom? 2) What function does it perform in ethics? 3) What is the relationship between practical wisdom and other ethical categories? The article is divided into four parts. Each of them concerns different aspects of the analysis of practical wisdom. As a result, the author has come to several important conclusions: Practical wisdom 1) enables appropriate action, i.e. success in action; 2) refers not only to the means-to-ends relationship, but refers to the end itself; 3) is imperative, because it tells what to do; 4) referring to the unusual situation, it allows to understand that every general principle is limited; 5) it is the intellectual ability to recognize how to achieve happiness.

2013

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply "wisdom") is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life.

2015

The paper is a reflection on the role of practical wisdom in ethics. By explaining and trying to understand the essence of practical wisdom, the author has endeavoured to determine whether it can be treated as a central ethical category, and if so, then why. In these analyses, author has referred to the concept of Aristotle, universally acknowledged as the classical one. Characterizing and describing that concept, she tries to answer three questions: 1) What is practical wisdom? 2) What function does it perform in ethics? 3) What is the relationship between practical wisdom and other ethical categories? The article is divided into four parts. Each of them concerns different aspects of the analysis of practical wisdom. As a result, the author has come to several important conclusions: Practical wisdom 1) enables appropriate action, i.e. success in action; 2) refers not only to the means-to-ends relationship, but refers to the end itself; 3) is imperative, because it tells what to do;...