Cultivating Practical Wisdom

Dissertation, University of Minnesota (2013)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

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.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Wisdom as an Expert Skill.Jason D. Swartwood - 2013 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (3):511-528.
Phronesis and Techne: The Skill Model of Wisdom Defended.Cheng-Hung Tsai - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (2):234-247.
Cultivating Practical Wisdom as Education.Aaron Marshall & Malcolm Thorburn - 2014 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 46 (14):1541-1553.
Philosophical Foundations of Wisdom.Jason Swartwood & Valerie Tiberius - 2019 - In Robert Sternberg & Judith Gluek, A Handbook of Wisdom, 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press. pp. 10-39.
Wisdom: A Skill Theory.Cheng-Hung Tsai - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Philosophical foundations for the study of wisdom.Jason Swartwood - 2022 - In Judith Glück & Robert Sternberg, The Psychology of Wisdom: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. pp. 15 - 34.
Virtue Habituation and the Skill of Emotion Regulation.Paul E. Carron - 2021 - In Tom P. S. Angier & Lisa Ann Raphals, Skill in Ancient Ethics: The Legacy of China, Greece and Rome. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. pp. 115-140.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-09-27

Downloads
993 (#22,668)

6 months
96 (#66,259)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jason Swartwood
Saint Paul College

References found in this work

Thinking, Fast and Slow.Daniel Kahneman - 2011 - New York: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
On Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse & Glen Pettigrove - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior.John M. Doris - 2002 - New York: Cambridge University Press.

View all 79 references / Add more references