Wisdom, long a topic of interest to moral philosophers, is increasingly the focus of social science research. Philosophers have historically been concerned to develop a rationally defensible account of the nature of wisdom and its role in the moral life, often inspired in various ways by virtue theoretical accounts of practical wisdom (phronesis). Wisdom scientists seek to, among other things, define wisdom and its components so that we can measure them. Are the measures used by (...) wisdom scientists actually measuring what philosophers have in mind when they discuss practical wisdom? I argue that they are not. Contemporary measures of wisdom and its components may pick out some necessary prerequisites of practical wisdom, but they do not measure a philosophically plausible practical wisdom or its components. After explaining the argument and defending it against objections, I consider its implications. Should wisdom scientists ignore the philosophical conception of practical wisdom in favor of other conceptions, revise their methods to try to measure it, or continue the interdisciplinary study of practical wisdom without expecting to measure it? I make a preliminary argument for the third option. (shrink)

Can we find true bliss in any kind of knowledge or is it proper to wisdom only? In this essay I consider different medieval models of the relationship of knowledge to wisdom and pleasure, beginning with Augustine, then to monastic models, before turning to Scholastic models: the early Scholastic model of the relationship between knowledge is very different from the Aristotelian understanding of intellectual felicity developed by Scholastic philosophers and theologians in the thirteenth century. For Nicholas of Cusa (...) intellectual pleasure is above any pleasure that can be attained by discursive reason; finally, I discuss Charles Bovelles’ synthesis between the neo-Platonic model of the relationship between knowledge and wisdom, which he himself devised, and Augustine’s understanding of the distinction between the two. Thus, after a long historical development we return to the beginning. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether AI can possess wisdom, a complex and deeply human capacity. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, 4E cognition, Material Engagement Theory, and engaged epistemology, to argue that wisdom is a dynamic force unfolding through meaningful life experiences and resonant interactions with the world. Central to our discussion is Rosa's concept of resonance, essential for fostering personal growth, emotional empathy, as well as existential and bodily connectedness to the world and its unfolding into (...) an uncertain future. Despite the advanced capabilities of AI/Large Language Models (LLMs), we demonstrate their inability to embody wisdom due to their lack of deep sense-making, embodied interaction, and meaningful engagement with the world and future potentials. We emphasize the need for cultivating human wisdom to ensure technological advancements enrich rather than diminish the human experience, advocating for a balanced and reflective human-technology relationship. (shrink)

If it is true, as I have argued in an earlier essay, that discontinuity is not an unintended side-effect of our ambition to attain goals that are in line with our identity, but the result of our giving in to a sublime “why not?,” then how can we conceive of history as a process? In this essay I will explore the thesis that my notion that the discontinuities of history spring from a dehors texte squares well with an evolutionary (...) view of history. I will do so by giving an account of how Lenin and Trotsky brought off one of the primordial discontinuities of the twentieth century, the Russian Revolution. Starting with Trotsky's remark that Lenin owed his success to his “imagination,” I show that the October 1917 coup d'état was not guided by strategy or driven by ideology, but by a series of “inspired” improvisations in which the protagonists fled forward into the unknown. Trotsky describes Lenin's “intuition of action” as the fruit of his ability to take leave of the system of complexity reduction that is stored in conventions, received wisdom, and other things we take for granted. Trotsky in effect says that Lenin's improvisations were most successful when he was so completely “possessed” by his deeds that he didn't fully know what he was doing—when, that is, he was in a state of dissociation. In Lenin's inspired deeds the “latent powers of the organism” that humans have “inherited from animal ancestors” rose up, Trotsky said, and “smashed through the doors of psychic routine and—together with the highest historico-philosophical generalizations—stood up in the service of the revolution.” Acting out the dehors texte, Lenin brought about one of the metamorphoses in which humanity mutates to new—though not necessarily higher or happier—levels. The essay includes some remarks on what all this might mean for the relation between history and theory in the upcoming years. (shrink)

Justice is illustrated by how humans treat others. Human society can no longer be considered just if it continues to treat animals instrumentally, disregarding the moral worth of each individual creature. Emile Durkheim's division of labor theory offers a groundwork for providing animals limited rights within a human-dominated society. Solidarity can be fostered between animals and humans by internalizing the principle that all organisms are interdependent. This principle is the foundation for granting animals moral status. By recognizing the role animals (...) play in our society, we can acknowledge our obligations to them. Utilizing a mechaorganic solidarity, humans can establish justification for moral treatment of animals. (shrink)

Love and Death move through this world of ours like things apart-underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other mode of existence. When Death comes, breaking into the circle of our friends, words fail us, our mental machinery ceases to operate, all our little stores of wit and wisdom, our maxims, our mottoes, accumulated from daily experience, evaporate and are of no avail. These things do not seem to touch or illuminate in any effective (...) way the strange vast Presence whose wings darken the world for us. And with Love, though in an opposite sense, it is the same. Words are of no use, all our philosophy fails-whether to account for the pain, or to fortify against the glamour, or to describe the glory of the experience.These figures, Love and Death, move through the world, like closest friends indeed, never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other's footsteps, undoing each other's work, fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind.Is it possible that at length and after ages we may attain to liberate ourselves from their overlordship-to dominate them and make them our ministers and attendants? Can we wrest them from their seeming tyranny over the human race, and from their hostility to each other? Can we persuade them to lay aside their disguise and appear to us for what they no doubt are-even the angels and messengers of a new order of existence? (shrink)

The Yoga Sutras are Patanjali's classic on how to experience oneness (Samadhi) within yoga practice. Many serious yoga students want to bring the wisdom of the Sutras to their practice, but often find the text impenetrable and difficult to relate to. The Tantra of the Yoga Sutras remedies this by offering an interpretation that is uniquely relatable, teachable, and accessible. Yogi and tantric master Alan Finger shows contemporary practitioners and students that Samadhi is not something that we strive for (...) in the future, but something that we can experience now. Many interpreters of the Yoga Sutras describe Samadhi as an unreachable goal for the ordinary yogi. Finger's interpretation delivers yoga practices that are doable, with attainable and transformative results. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

Some readers, even though well versed in philosophy, may be bewildered by Wittgenstein's posthumous book on the philosophy of mathematics and unable to find a dominant theme running through even a part of it; to list the main contents–headings would make them none the wiser. Although two main themes may in the end be discerned in it, they do not pervade the book after the usual manner of themes; one has rather the sense of wandering about the corridors of a (...) maze; and, to add to the reader's perplexity, the maze has no definite centre. This mode of presentation, leading one through a maze, whose “centre” is the discovery that there is no centre, in itself conveys some philosophical message. Can we possibly say what Wittgenstein was trying to do? To answer this, seeing that this work is largely in line with the rest of his philosophizing, I propose to bid the present book a long farewell, to take an excursion into the field of Wittgensteinian and related philosophy, and against this background to try to give some picture and assessment of the contents of the work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:China and Contemporary Millenarianism—Something New under the SunBenjamin I. SchwartzOne of the most obvious remarks one can make about contemporary China is that China has no reason to be excited about contemporary Western millenarianism. If by "millenarianism" one refers to an apocalyptic transformation of the entire human condition based on the Christian calendar, then there is no reason for Chinese, Jews, and Moslems, who have their own historic visions, (...) to find any significance in the history of the last millennium. At the end of the first millennium or the beginning of the second, China was at a high point in its civilization. To the extent that apocalyptic tendencies could be found in either its high or its popular culture, these tendencies were the focus of Buddhism or religious Daoism. They were not tied to specific calendars, and in an Indian spirit they spoke in terms of "kalpas," which might last for hundreds of millions of years—or might occur next week.In addition, it should be noted—as has been pointed out by Professor Landes and others—that the notion that there was an all-consuming preoccupation with an impending apocalypse in the year A.D. 1000 is highly debatable. Among the more scholarly members of the clergy in medieval times there were already modes of thinking that, under the influence of Islamic and Jewish philosophers, were pointing in the direction of a non-apocalyptic scholastic philosophy.In all cultures down through the ages, an apocalyptic vision of deliverance has promised relief from the vast burden of human suffering and despair—a vision that would be recognized as such even by those who sought no apocalyptic solutions and who continued to believe that our this-worldly life still promised compensatory satisfactions, limited as these might be. They would not accept the Theravada/ Hinayana Buddhist belief that even what we call our individual pleasures are a function of our individual sufferings. According to that belief, our love of our children or our wives is poisoned by our acute awareness of the transient nature of their existence. Release from the world of samsara can be attained only by escaping the world of individuated samsara into the ineffable world of Nirvana.Turning to the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament, we find that the author, who represents an amalgam of Greek and Hebrew wisdom, is not an apocalyptist and still hopes that we will garner certain satisfactions from our lives as individuals in this mundane existence. Yet his disappointment, suffering, and exasperation over human vanities and duplicities often correspond to the catalogue of sufferings in the Theravada scriptures. But, like the Theravada Buddhists, he believes that in this world of ignorance (avidya) there is also "nothing new under the sun." In the endless generations of individual human lives, every mode of human ignorance and suffering has certainly existed in the endless cycle of samsara. It is nevertheless true that in the total attention on every aspect of human life from the techno-economic side, [End Page 193] we find a totally new way of neutralizing the age-old causes of human suffering. Gautama Buddha regarded our ordinary individual pleasures as poisoned by suffering, by the realization that individual pleasures soon fade away. Yet Prozac seems to continue to work without producing anxiety. Here, indeed, we have something new under the sun!In fact, the new technological-economic millenarianism does indeed represent something different from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century technological and economic transformations that seemed to offer the possibility of a steady amelioration of the human condition. Nineteenth-century technological and economic meliorism could be related to older forms of what might be called "materialistic" improvement. Yet nineteenth-century materialistic progressivism continued to be linked to other ethical concerns not only by Christian beliefs but also by many of the secular ideologies of nineteenth-century Europe. There were entire ideologies of socialism, liberalism, anarchism, romanticism, nationalism, et cetera, which continued to be deeply distressed by the non-"materialistic," ethical consequences of techno-economic progress. Techno-economic progress has not, after all, prevented the Holocaust, the Gulag, and the horrors of two world wars. On the contrary, it has raised... (shrink)

In “Mind, matter and metabolism,” Godfrey-Smith’s objective is to “develop a picture” in which, first, the basis of living activity in physical processes “makes sense,” second, the basis of proto-cognitive activity in living activity “makes sense” and third, “the basis of subjective experience in metabolically situated cognitive processes also makes sense.” show that he fails to attain all three of these objectives, largely owing to the nature and modularization of metabolism.

A vibrant new translation of Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” a pointed reminder to make the most of our time Who doesn’t worry sometimes that smart phones, the Internet, and TV are robbing us of time and preventing us from having a life? How can we make the most of our time on earth? In the first century AD, the Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger offered one of the most famous answers to that question in his essay “On the (...) Shortness of Life”—a work that has more to teach us today than ever before. In How to Have a Life, James Romm presents a vibrant new translation of Seneca’s brilliant essay, plus two Senecan letters on the same theme, complete with the original Latin on facing pages and an inviting introduction. With devastating satiric wit, skillfully captured in this translation, Seneca lampoons the ways we squander our time and fail to realize how precious it is. We don’t allow people to steal our money, yet we allow them to plunder our time, or else we give it away ourselves in useless, idle pursuits. Seneca also describes how we can make better use of our brief days and years. In the process, he argues, we can make our lives longer, or even everlasting, because to live a real life is to attain a kind of immortality. A counterweight to the time-sucking distractions of the modern world, How to Have a Life offers priceless wisdom about making our time—and our lives—count. (shrink)

In order to make progress with solving our grave global problems we need to bring about a revolution in academia so that problems of living are given intellectual priority, and the basic intellectual aim becomes to seek and promote wisdom, and not just acquire knowledge.

The problem to be discussed here concerns ontology so far as it may not be formed by scientific theory. In brief terms, the problem arises in the following way. On the one hand, the world surely consists of whatever is there, irrespective of whether human beings are around or not, and irrespective especially of whether human beings have constructed any scientific theories depicting the nature of the world; on the other hand, scientific theories are subject to the limitation that we (...) can never verify them or prove them to be true, so that the ontology prescribed by scientific theory is not firmly established but is only what is attributed to the world by a fallible scientific theory at any given time. The problem could also be put in terms of ‘conceptual networks’ or in terms of language-systems. (shrink)

Biofunctionalism appears to be a pioneering effort to formulate a portrait of the body&endash;mind which acknowledges intuitions we have about human functioning that go beyond the analytic approach of the cognitive sciences but that can yet remain within the worldview and methods of the analytic portrait. The intuitions are : wholeness, interdependent causality, present temporality, effortless action, realness, panoramic knowing, and value. Such themes are most fully developed in the meditative and contemplative traditions of the world. Biofunctionalism is evaluated both (...) in terms of how well it instantiates those themes and in terms of its ability to generate explanations and predictions within the scientific context. (shrink)

Can we learn to create a better world? Yes, if we first create traditions and institutions of learning rationally devoted to that end. At present universities all over the world are dominated by the idea that the basic aim of academic inquiry is to acquire knowledge. Such a conception of inquiry, judged from the standpoint of helping us learn wisdom and civilization, is grotesquely and damagingly irrational. We need to change our approach to academic enterprise if we are to (...) create a kind of inquiry rationally devoted to helping us become more civilized. (shrink)

In the article I consider whether philosophical anthropology offers knowledge about man. I begin with a definition of knowledge, then I present philosophical anthropology against the background of other kinds of anthropology. Having explained what is proper to it, I show that its goal cannot be the attainment of knowledge. Knowledge has requirements that an unreduced philosophical anthropology cannot fulfill; reduction deprives it of what is proper to it. However, the fact that it does not produce knowledge is not a (...) defect. The goal of my article is to create a common arena for considering various different approaches to man; this requires that the various parties admit that man cannot be reduced to what can be known about him. In order to know something, it is necessary to use carefully selected methods; it is not the case that merely saying something about man implies the possession of knowledge about him. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy of Taste by Huanan GongChunpeng Hao (bio)Philosophy of Taste. By Huanan Gong. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2022. Pp. xii + 312. Paperback ¥59.00, isbn 978-7-108-07489-8. Postmodern thought in Western philosophy often criticizes the tradition of logocentrism and ocularcentrism. This tradition of philosophical observation can be found in Pythagoras' definition of the philosopher, who is a spectator as distinct from the sportsman and the merchant in the (...) Great Games. The attitude of observation reflects the logical, objective, and neutral characteristics of philosophy. Especially in Plato's philosophy we could find this objectified "observation" (p. 18). This tradition laid the foundation of Western philosophy. Since then, philosophy has developed "metaphysics," "ontology," "epistemology," "rationalism," "idealism," and other themes. However, if we examine the original meaning of the word "philosophy," it only refers to the "love" (philia) of "wisdom" (sophia). The Chinese "love of wisdom" is different from that of Western philosophers. Professor Gong Huanan's Philosophy of Taste is a work about "taste" and "Dao". It represents a different path from the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. In the book, Gong reveals how the Chinese use these three core concepts ("taste", "sense" and "xiang") to identify things, discuss nature, understand the Dao and live in the world, thus outlining a world of Chinese culture that is different from that of the West. He delves into the principles and rich meanings inherent in these fundamental concepts of Chinese philosophy, and then explores ways of reconstructing Chinese philosophy drawing on contemporary resources (p. 307). There are seven chapters in Philosophy of Taste. In Chapters 1 and 2, which offer a discussion on "taste," Gong gives a broad overview of the definition of "taste" and its scope in Chinese thought; Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the subject of "sense," which moves from taste to the relationship between the senses and the mind. Finally, in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, the main discussion is on "xiang" (象, shape, appearance), where the author distinguishes between "xiang" and "form". "Xiang" in Chinese culture has no form, so it has little relevance to vision, and there is no Western ocularcentrism in China (p. 192). Gong also discusses expressions in the Chinese tradition that equate wisdom with sight and hearing, for example, cong ming 聪明 (intelligent, clever, bright), which is synonymous with wisdom, originally refers to good hearing and [End Page 1] good sight (p. 36). However, Chinese culture is diverse and not "monotheistic." There are many ways of attaining wisdom or the Dao, and Buddhism uses the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind as a method of practice to attain it (p. 19). For it is basically through the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, etc. that one receives information, and among them the sense of taste of the tongue is a viewpoint with Chinese characteristics. Chinese people are very fond of eating, but eating does not simply mean desire and unruliness--there is thought in it. As The Doctrine of the Mean or Zhongyong 中庸 says, "There is no body but eats and drinks. But they are few who can distinguish flavors" (p. 1). The Chinese word for "sense" (ganjue 感觉) has two parts, one is feel (gan 感) and another is awareness (jue 觉). Everyone has the ability to sense, but few have awareness. Only those who have both can know the truth. "Taste" seems to be closer to feeling and is an attribute of objects, of which there are several kinds, such as sour, sweet, bitter, and spicy. But it is not unrelated to the perceiver, for without the organ of perception, there would be no taste. This organ of taste reception is the tongue. In Chinese, "tongue" is also known as the root of the soul, or the opening of the mind (p. 25). The tongue and the mind work together to create the activity of the sense of taste. In short, the sense of taste is the unification of the attributes of things and the human mind in sensation. It is the same as knowing the Dao, which is in everything around us, but one needs to have a "heart" to discover it (p. 89). Gong holds that, in Chinese thought... (shrink)

We undertook a short-term longitudinal study to test whether a set of methods common to current theories of wisdom transmission can foster wisdom in students in a measurable way. The three-dimensional wisdom scale (3D-WS) was administered to 131 students in five wisdom-promoting introductory philosophy courses and 176 students in seven introductory philosophy and psychology control courses at the beginning and end of the semester. The experimental group was divided in two (“Wisdom 1” and “Wisdom (...) 2”), and each was taught a distinct curriculum consistent with theories of wisdom education. Results of repeated measures MANOVA showed that over the course of the semester average 3D-WS scores decreased in the control classes, stayed the same in the Wisdom 1 classes, and increased in the Wisdom 2 classes. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a wisdom curriculum has been demonstrated to increase wisdom in a traditional higher education setting. (shrink)

In considering what it means to lead organizations effectively and ethically, the literature comprising spirituality at work and spiritual leadership theory has become highly influential, especially in the USA. It has also attracted significant criticism. While in this paper, we endorse this critique, we argue that the strand of literature which purportedly takes a Christian standpoint within the wider SAW school of thought, largely misconstrues and misapplies the teaching of its founder, Jesus. As a result, in dismissing the claims and (...) application of SAW and SLT, there is a real risk that we lose the vital contribution of Christian thought, not least some of the timeless counter-cultural wisdom of Jesus which, we contend, offers a vital foundation to the practice of ethical leadership and business ethics in organizations. In proposing a way forward, two thorny issues which face all leaders are addressed: dealing with ego and closing the gap between what we say and what we do. The more we understand about the dynamics of human nature, the more we learn about the profundity of Jesus’ teachings. We then propose a number of ways in which Jesus-centred ethical leadership can be practised. Each is radical and each implies risk: both the personal risk of inner renewal arising from repentance as a doorway to personal integrity, as well as the risk of opposing unethical practices and promoting the excellence of core practices in the workplace. (shrink)

Two great problems of learning confront humanity: learning about the nature of the universe and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe, and learning how to become civilized. The first problem was solved, in essence, in the 17th century, with the creation of modern science. But the second problem has not yet been solved. Solving the first problem without also solving the second puts us in a situation of great danger. All our current global problems (...) have arisen as a result. What we need to do, in response to this unprecedented crisis, is learn from our solution to the first problem how to solve the second. This was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment. Unfortunately, in carrying out this programme, the Enlightenment made three blunders, and it is this defective version of the Enlightenment programme, inherited from the past, that is still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academic inquiry in the 21st century. In order to solve the second great problem of learning we need to correct the three blunders of the traditional Enlightenment. This involves changing the nature of social inquiry, so that social science becomes social methodology or social philosophy, concerned to help us build into social life the progress-achieving methods of aim-oriented rationality, arrived at by generalizing the progress-achieving methods of science. It also involves, more generally, bringing about a revolution in the nature of academic inquiry as a whole, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to become wiser by increasingly cooperatively rational means. The scientific task of improving knowledge and understanding of nature becomes a part of the broader task of improving global wisdom. The outcome would be what we so urgently need: a kind of inquiry rationally designed and devoted to helping us make progress towards a genuinely civilized world. We would succeed in doing what the Enlightenment tried but failed to do: learn from scientific progress how to go about making social progress towards as good a world as possible. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain and showcase the promising methodology of testimonial network analysis and visualization for experimental epistemology, arguing that it can be used to gain insights and answer philosophical questions in social epistemology. Our use case is the epistemic community that discusses vaccine safety primarily in English on Twitter. In two studies, we show, using both statistical analysis and exploratory data visualization, that there is almost no neutral or ambivalent discussion of vaccine safety on Twitter. Roughly half the (...) accounts engaging with this topic are pro-vaccine, while the other half are con-vaccine. We also show that these two camps rarely engage with one another, and that the con-vaccine camp has greater epistemic reach and receptivity than the pro-vaccine camp. In light of these findings, we question whether testimonial networks as they are currently constituted on popular fora such as Twitter are living up to their promise of delivering the wisdom of crowds. We conclude by pointing to directions for further research in digital social epistemology. (shrink)

In considering what it means to lead organizations effectively and ethically, the literature comprising spirituality at work and spiritual leadership theory has become highly influential, especially in the USA. It has also attracted significant criticism. While in this paper, we endorse this critique, we argue that the strand of literature which purportedly takes a Christian standpoint within the wider SAW school of thought, largely misconstrues and misapplies the teaching of its founder, Jesus. As a result, in dismissing the claims and (...) application of SAW and SLT, there is a real risk that we lose the vital contribution of Christian thought, not least some of the timeless counter-cultural wisdom of Jesus which, we contend, offers a vital foundation to the practice of ethical leadership and business ethics in organizations. In proposing a way forward, two thorny issues which face all leaders are addressed: dealing with ego and closing the gap between what we say and what we do. The more we understand about the dynamics of human nature, the more we learn about the profundity of Jesus’ teachings. We then propose a number of ways in which Jesus-centred ethical leadership can be practised. Each is radical and each implies risk: both the personal risk of inner renewal arising from repentance as a doorway to personal integrity, as well as the risk of opposing unethical practices and promoting the excellence of core practices in the workplace. (shrink)

The Wisdom We're Born With explores the desire to live that we carry with us from birth. While some people may believe that it's impossible to acquire perspective like Gottlieb's without a similarly catastrophic life experience, the fact is that every infant possesses a raw need to keep on going. Gottlieb's book awakens us to the idea of our natural perspective, traces the growth and diminishment of that perspective over the years, and brings us back to advanced age, where (...) it recurs once more. If we are aware of this capacity in ourselves, we can actively nurture it, enabling ourselves to embrace the desire to live and grow every day, whether we're joyful or in the grip of a powerful depression. In a time of anxiety and worry, Gottlieb's words provide comfort and strength-if we can remember the wisdom we're born with, we can possess a limitless energy to keep fighting. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present re-enactment interviewing and to propose that it can be used to reveal tacit caring knowledge. This approach generates knowledge not readily attainable by other research methods, which we demonstrate by analysing the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of re-enactment interviewing. We also give examples from a study where re-enactment was used. As tacit knowledge is often characteristic of care, re-enactment interviewing has the potential to engage the informant in a holistic mode and thereby (...) reveal wisdom of the body. When the care provider recalls an event, the details are articulated, which contributes to in-depth data, which subsequently serves as a basis for trustworthy analysis. (shrink)

The crisis of our times is that we have science without wisdom. This is the crisis behind all the others. Population growth, the terrifyingly lethal character of modern war and terrorism, immense differences of wealth across the globe, annihilation of indigenous people, cultures and languages, impending depletion of natural resources, destruction of tropical rain forests and other natural habitats, rapid mass extinction of species, pollution of sea, earth and air, thinning of the ozone layer, above all global warming - (...) even the aids epidemic: all these relatively recent crises have been made possible by modern science and technology. Indeed, in a perfectly reasonable sense of "cause", they have been caused by modern science and technology. An essential step we need to take, in order to tackle these global problems more effectively, intelligently and humanely than we have done so far, is to create a new kind of academic inquiry which puts problems of living, and the pursuit of wisdom, at the heart of the enterprise. (shrink)

Can collectives be wise? The thesis that they can has recently received a lot of attention. It has been argued that, in many judgmental or decision-making tasks, suitably organized groups can outperform their individual members. In this paper, I discuss the lessons we can learn about collective wisdom from the emerging theory of judgment aggregation, as distinct from the literature on Condorcet’s jury theorem.

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many various feelings that we experience, there is a discrete group that, thanks to their involvement with universals, may be regarded as philosophical. Wonder, grief, compassion, tenderness, hope, despair, and delight are philosophical if they are experienced on behalf of (...) humankind and addressed to the world as a whole. The vocation of philosophy is to expand the realm of feelings through the generalizing capacity of the reason, so that love, joy, and pain can be experienced in a noble way, on a maximally global scale, not reducible to private or practical situations. Emotions of philosophical cast affect the world more powerfully than metaphysical ideas and logical propositions. Revolutions are driven less by ideas than by philosophical wrath, exasperation with the existing order of things, and the feeling that the world is unjust. It is in this context that Epstein's essay defines the genre of lyric philosophy as a direct self-expression of the thinking subject in the process of attaining self-cognition — as represented, for instance, in the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and Nietzsche. Philosophical subjecthood as a means of self-expression for the transcendental subject should be distinguished from the purely personal subjectivity inherent to empirical individuals, in the same way and to the same extent as philosophical feelings should be distinguished from mundane ones experienced in everyday situations. Since the subject focused on itself is essential to lyricism, we may even speak of the generic, inescapable lyricism of philosophy per se. (shrink)

Since before we can remember, humanity aims to overcome its biological limitations; such a goal has certainly played a key role in the advent of technique. However, despite the benefits that technique may bring, the people who make use of it will inevitably be under risk of harm. Even though human technical wisdom consists in attaining the best result without compromising anybody’s safety, misuses are always a possibility in the horizon. Nowadays, technology can be used for more than just (...) improving human capacities, preserving and restoring health or promoting human well-being. It also enables us to overcome human limitations and reach way beyond our "natural design". That being said, what could possibly justify the fear for these new directions of biotechnology? Should medicine and health care change their traditional goals and begin searching for artificial improvements to wellness in human nature? In this paper, I will hereby present and briefly discuss the main topics of the contemporary issue of human enhancement: the therapy-enhancement distinction, the possibility of cognitive enhancements and better physical performances, the fight against senescence, the arguments for and against human eugenics, the search for perfection, the quest of moral enhancement, the problem of public priorities, and some questions on medical ethics. Then, finally, I will want to present some realist perspectives on the subject. (shrink)

“Nature knows best” is reconsidered from an ecological perspective which suggests that we ought to follow nature. The phrase “follow nature” has many meanings. In an absolute law-of-nature sense, persons invariably and necessarily act in accordance with natural laws, and thus cannot but follow nature. In an artifactual sense, all deliberate human conduct is viewed as unnatural, and thus it is impossible to follow nature. As a result, the answer to the question, whether we can and ought to follow nature, (...) must be sought in a relative sense according to which human conduct is sometimes more and sometimes less natural. Four specific relative senses are examined: a homeostatic sense, an imitative ethical sense, an axiological sense, and a tutorial sense. Nature can be followed in a homeostatic sense in which human conduct utilizes naturallaws for our well-being in a stable environment, but this following is nonmoral since the moral elements can be separated from it. Nature cannot be followed in an imitative ethical sense because nature itself is either amoral or, by some accounts, immoral. Guidance for inter-human ethical conduct, therefore, must be sought not in nature, but in human culture. Nevertheless, in an axiological sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by viewing it as an object of orienting interest and value. In this connection, three environments are distinguished for human well-being in whichwe can and ought to participate-the urban, the rural, and the wild. Finally, in a tutorial sense, persons can and ought to follow nature by letting it teach us son1ething of our human role, our place, and our appropriate character in the natural system as a whole. In this last sense, "following nature" is commended to anyone who seeks in his human conduct to maintain a good fit with the natural environment-a sense of following nature involving both efficiency and wisdom. (shrink)

Dance is the gesture of life. In other words, dance is a moving gesture to attain life's aim. As people have will to accomplish their aim, the will of life is expressed in dancing. Dance comes, therefore, from the heart as it arises from the flow of mind. The visible dancing feature begins from invisible mind. While life is made of flesh and mind, dance is the gesture of life containing both. Culture is from people's life. As the ground (...) of culture have people's personal and also collective history, it is the case in Chum (Korean traditional dance). No matter what region or folk is, every ethnical dance express its own condensed culture and heritage. In this respect, though each ethnical traditional dance can't be evaluated, Korean sees people as the small universe. Chum does not simply express ourbody. We conceived nature and human as one, as a whole that cannot be dividable. Based on that wisdom, Chum has expressed the holistic gesture of Korean and nature. As summary, Chum is the movement of nature and flow of mind of Korean, expressing our culture. (shrink)

The paper explores the issue; “can our wisdom save the Human Project?” another words “can we live wiser and longer” or “should we feel better and live shorter?” To save the Human Project, which can fall due to overdeveloped civilization, perhaps we should pursue logos-driven wisdom, because the threat is too dangerous to leave room for uncertainty. The review of how philosophy, responsible for “wisdom”, has been developed shows that the empiric study of wisdom is the (...) task of the last 20 years only, since it has only been in the last centuries that philosophers grasped the issue of reason. This paper presents a framework for the necessity of developing eco-philosophy, which includes cognition, survival and action philosophies. These kinds of philosophies can be perceived through the tool of Wisdom Diamond. The author is not very optimistic whether our wisdom can save the Human Project, which was designed to last only a limited few billion (US measure) years. On the other hand, perhaps some mythos can help in this Project, otherwise would life be too boring, not worthy of being longer? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eighth Conference of the European Network of Buddhist-Christian StudiesSt. Ottilien, Germany, 11–15 June 2009John D’Arcy MayWith a higher proportion of Buddhist participants from Europe, Asia, and the United States than ever before, the European Network of Buddhist-Christian Studies at its 2009 conference in the Benedictine Archabbey of St. Ottilien near Munich addressed the question of authority, both spiritual and temporal, in the two traditions. There seems to have been (...) little comparative study of this topic, and there were many surprises as the speakers were confronted with aspects they had not been aware of in their own traditions and in those of others.The conference began with intercultural music that drew on Christian and Buddhist themes. After this, Brother Josef Götz spoke about the Benedictine Archabbey of St. Ottilien, stressing its longstanding and enriching participation in intermonastic dialogue. Elizabeth Harris, the incoming president of the network, then introduced the theme. She pointed to contemporary literature in English that represented the crisis in authority in the West and stressed that this was compounded by the awareness that some of those with power to enforce authority in the world did not possess legitimacy. She then raised a series of questions connected with the different forms of authority to be discussed at the conference—from the balance between external and internal authority to the struggle with institutional authority for equality between men and women. She hoped for three outcomes from the conference: that participants would be able to explore what their own tradition said about authority; that they would give wisdom to each other on the theme, Buddhist to Christian and Christian to Buddhist; and that all would reflect on how they represented themselves to the wider society, both to those searching for religious authority and those rejecting all authority.Following up this theme of a contemporary crisis of authority, Rita Gross said that Buddhists, in the spirit of the teaching on impermanence (P. anicca), need to take seriously the historicity of their different traditions in order to develop a nonsectarian history of Buddhism that acknowledges the authenticity of the foundational Buddhism [End Page 189] of the first four hundred years. The Kālāmasutta (AN.I.188 –193), one of the discourses in the Pāli canon, which was cited again and again in the course of the discussion, urges the Buddhist to assess the trustworthiness of teachers and their teaching, but criteria such as “what the wise would accept” or whether a text is accepted by the saṅgha (community) raise the problem of determining what constitutes wisdom and the authenticity of a text, as noted by Shenpen Hookham and Zhiru Shi. Rita Gross remarked on the irony that many Western Buddhists, despite their rationalistic education, abandon critical discernment and prefer myths to history. This is regrettable, as Western Buddhists have their own contributions to make to the further development of Buddhism.Kajsa Ahlstrand, referring to the World Values Survey, pointed to changing attitudes toward obedience, disobedience, and rebellion. Disobedience is now seen as praiseworthy, whereas obedience could be harmful to one’s mental health. Obedience in this “new key” emphasizes rights over duties. One can thus identify varieties of Christianity that are “hard” or “soft,” “strong” or “mild,” in various combinations, which she illustrated using different cheeses (thereby causing some puzzlement among the Asian participants!). We were left with the question whether there is an unchanging essence of eternal truth in either tradition, which is beyond historical change and sociological conditioning, and the realization that both obedience and disobedience can go terribly wrong. As Rita Gross concluded, it is our attachment that is the problem, not the things we are attached to.Spiritual authority is central to both Buddhism and Christianity, but it can take very different forms. Shenpen Hookham maintained that for Buddhists spiritual authority resides in enlightened people, whether monastic or lay, and is the result of realization rather than learning. The visible monastic saṅgha merely “represents” the ariyasaṅgha (noble community) of the truly enlightened (though this was later contested). The authority to teach derives directly from the teacher’s spiritual attainments or his or her status as the... (shrink)

The “wisdom of the crowd” phenomenon refers to the finding that the aggregate of a set of proposed solutions from a group of individuals performs better than the majority of individual solutions. Most often, wisdom of the crowd effects have been investigated for problems that require single numerical estimates. We investigate whether the effect can also be observed for problems where the answer requires the coordination of multiple pieces of information. We focus on combinatorial problems such as the (...) planar Euclidean traveling salesperson problem, minimum spanning tree problem, and a spanning tree memory task. We develop aggregation methods that combine common solution fragments into a global solution and demonstrate that these aggregate solutions outperform the majority of individual solutions. These case studies suggest that the wisdom of the crowd phenomenon might be broadly applicable to problem-solving and decision-making situations that go beyond the estimation of single numbers. (shrink)

The paper explores the issue; “can our wisdom save the Human Project?” another words “can we live wiser and longer” or “should we feel better and live shorter?” To save the Human Project, which can fall due to overdeveloped civilization, perhaps we should pursue logos-driven wisdom, because the threat is too dangerous to leave room for uncertainty. The review of how philosophy, responsible for “wisdom”, has been developed shows that the empiric study of wisdom is the (...) task of the last 20 years only, since it has only been in the last centuries that philosophers grasped the issue of reason. This paper presents a framework for the necessity of developing eco-philosophy, which includes cognition, survival and action philosophies. These kinds of philosophies can be perceived through the tool of Wisdom Diamond. The author is not very optimistic whether our wisdom can save the Human Project, which was designed to last only a limited few billion years. On the other hand, perhaps some mythos can help in this Project, otherwise would life be too boring, not worthy of being longer? (shrink)

As is well understood, the values inherent in the dominant neoclassical economic paradigm are self- interest and optimisation. These are the values that guide individuals and policymakers in advanced capitalist economies in their economic decision making. As a consequence, the economics discipline, arguably, is insufficiently oriented to helping people and organisations make wise choices, choices about what is really and truly in people's best interests. In other words, there is strong reason to believe that economics has a wisdom deficit. (...) This paper draws on great philosophers such as Aristotle to explain what wisdom is and why, although economics is concerned with the normative aspect of decision making, economics has too infrequently been used to help people or their societies make wise decisions. This paper is also concerned with how a society's economic decision-making processes can be improved in order that these processes incorporate a much greater dose of wisdom. One relevant question here is: can we learn with the help of philosophers, psychologists and organisation researchers how to make economic decisions that apply the practical wisdom that Aristotle advocated? This paper's overall purpose is first to point the way toward greater decision-making wisdom, and second to propose one method for improving the wisdom of important economic-related decision making. Hopefully, this paper will serve to put the issue of decision-making wisdom higher on the agenda of economists and, as a consequence, lead to wiser decisions in the economic sphere, thereby reducing the wisdom deficit. (shrink)

Religion inspires honesty. The love of money incites dishonesty. Religious and monetary values apply to all religions. We develop a formative theoretical model of monetary wisdom, treat religiosity (God) and the love of money (mammon), as two yoked antecedents—competing moral issues (Time 1), and frame the latent construct in good barrels (performance or humane contexts, Time 2), which leads to (dis)honesty (Time 3). We explore the direct and indirect paths and the model across genders. Our three-wave panel data (411 (...) participants) show that religious and monetary values are negatively correlated. Directly, religiosity consistently curbs dishonesty; surprisingly, the love of money has no impact on dishonesty. In the performance context, the two mediation effects reduce dishonesty. Across genders, this mediation effect is nonsignificant for males but significantly excites females' honesty. In the humane context, the two mediation effects are nonsignificant. Across genders, for the love of money, males passively curb dishonesty by omission, and females actively engage in honesty by commission. Decision-makers must challenge people's moral issues, frame them in good barrels, and help people become good apples, choice architects, and moral and ethical decision-makers, promoting the Matthew effect in religion. We offer practical implications to individuals and organizations. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that what we tend to see in contemporary accounts of human service practice in the relevant literature is a ‘common-sense’ informed by a complex mix of neoliberal political and policy imperatives and various kinds of technical-rational styles of administration and management. These accounts of practice can inadvertently contribute to the problems they are meant to address and can do more harm than good. Common-sense accounts of practice also align with how human services are typically regulated (...) and they align with prevailing ways the education of human services takes place, including in universities. Consequently, the same types of problems that take place with human service practice also take place with the institutionalisation and reproduction of human services. If we are serious about achieving good practice in human services, then we need to think more clearly about what practice in human services is. <br /><br />There is a good case for articulating a theory of human service practice to inspire new and better ways of achieving good practice. The theory of good practice outlined here draws on the philosophy of Aristotle and neo-Aristotelian accounts of practice. It draws especially on Dunne who argues that a theory of practice should offer a defensible account of how we should conceptualise the stuff that human services deal with, and the sorts of knowing, action and ends that best accord with such conceptualisations. <br /><br />I argue that the beings at the centre of human services should be understood as complex, emergent, unpredictable, and ‘wicked’ in the sense that Rittel and Webber talk about. This highlights the possibility that the people, problems and practices of human services can be revealed in multiple and contrary ways. Accordingly, human services hold both promises and dangers for people and good practice is far from self-evident and is highly contestable in each individual case. <br /><br />I argue that phronesis (practical wisdom) is the way of knowing that best corresponds to and is most suited to deal with the uncertain, messy, contingent and context-dependent beings of human services, which require and deserve ongoing deliberations and good determinations on each occasion that are at the same time always tentative and remain open to other suggestions and modification especially because our knowledge may be erroneous and incomplete. I argue that good practice also requires reflexivity and value rationality to help identify and alleviate the problems associated with neoliberal approaches to practice and as an alternative to technical rationality and value neutrality. <br /><br />I make the case for praxis (good action) along with a range of other human activities including value-rational deliberation as the forms of action that best align with and are most appropriate for dealing with the ever-changing, often inexplicable and always difficult beings of human services. Praxis is in accordance with phronesis and can be understood in part as durable practice and in part as responding to each case in new ways. In particular, it involves figuring out and enacting the most desirable course of action in each instance of practice while at the same time remaining receptive to other possibilities and to doing things differently particularly because we might not always be immediately aware of what we are doing, and our actions could be doing more harm than good. <br /><br />I show that clarity about our telos will help to re-orient human services to pursuing preferred ends and securing goods that are better suited to the entities of human services compared to instrumentally designed relations between widely applicable and transferable techniques and pre-determined outcomes. I argue for the telos of youth work to be enabling young people to live the good life. Following my accounts of phronesis and praxis this orientation of human services towards more desirable and ethical purposes takes the form of a commitment that is always carefully reconsidered at the same time as determinedly pursued. However, unlike outputs that can be wholly predetermined, efficiently sought after and completely achieved, this is an end that is never fully attained. This is especially the case because there is always more that can be known and done and because there are always disagreements on the goods to be secured. <br /><br />This theory of practice should correspond to and supports the education of people for professional practice. In particular, the education of human services needs to reproduce how the beings of human services are to be conceptualised and the ways of knowing, forms of action and ends that cohere. At the same time, university-based human service education should support the development, exercise and experience of good practice-as-praxis guided by phronesis. <br />. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddha Loves Me! This I Know, for the Dharma Tells Me SoDonald K. SwearerI intend no disrespect to either the Buddha or the Christ by my rewrite of Anna Bartlett Warner’s 1859 Sunday school song, “Jesus Loves Me.” That one might construct the Buddha in the image of a loving Jesus may be more startling or offensive to Buddhists (and also to Christians) than the modern, apologetic view of (...) the Buddha as a rational renouncer. Versions of both can be textually justified; however, each is a reification that reflects the bias of the interpreter. Both ignore the complexity of the figure of the Buddha within the varied and diverse traditions of Buddhism. My starting point in the following essay acknowledges this complexity as well as the inevitable limitations of my personal interpretation of the Buddha, necessarily conditioned by my experience. I propose to structure the essay around two polarities—universal/particular and wisdom/compassion—looking first at the Buddha and then briefly reflecting dialogically at the end of each section on the figure of the Christ.Buddha: Universal and ParticularIn my personal experience in Buddhist Asia, especially Thailand, and my studies of Buddhist traditions, in particular the Theravada, I have been impressed by the creative tension between the universal and particular dimensions of the figure of the [End Page 113] Buddha. Even the modern Western view of the Buddha evidences this tension. Typically the word Buddha evokes the story of Prince Siddhattha’s renunciation of his royal status, subsequent quest for enlightenment, and eventual realization of nibbana. 1 In the hands of a comparative mythologist such as Joseph Campbell, the detailed embellishments of the Buddha’s sacred biography are absorbed into the tripartite, monomyth structure of the hero’s narrative—separation, attainment, return. For Campbell, the story of the historical Buddha, Siddhattha Gotama, represents a rite of passage, a deep psychological truth of self-discovery symbolized by other heroes in world mythology. Despite the antistructuralist critique by historical and textual scholars, as well as the feminist criticism that the heroic journey does not reflect women’s experience, in one form or another the Buddha reified as an exemplar of the universal paradigm of the individual’s journey of self-realization continues to capture the Western imagination.A somewhat more sophisticated version of the universal hero motif is the Buddha as ‘rational renouncer,’ an interpretation favored by both Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism who portray the Buddha as an empiricist and pragmatist somewhat on the order of William James. In this view, Prince Siddhattha’s quest was a rational response to the experience of suffering, and the truth he perceived on the night of his enlightenment was nothing more nor less than a direct perception of the universal law of cause and effect obscured to ordinary awareness. De-emphasizing both the ascetical and devotional aspects of the Buddha’s sacred biography, the rational renouncer school of thought places its emphasis on epistemological transformation characterized in Buddhist texts as “seeing things as they really are.”The Buddha as universal hero and as rational renouncer can be critiqued as modernized, rationalized, westernized reifications of the Buddha, an example of the ‘orientialist’ distortion that characterized the colonial project. Charles Hallisey has pointed out that such reconstructions of the Buddha were not merely the products of Western scholars but owed much to Asian Buddhists as well. 2 But are we to assume that throughout the history of Buddhism, similar hermeneutical moves and debates over the nature of the Buddha did not exist? I find a tension in the Buddhist tradition between two contrasting images of the Buddha: as an exemplar of a universal truth, and as a being defined by the contingencies of human particularities.Theravada Buddhists find strong support in the sutta for a humanistic interpretation of the Buddha. In particular, they argue that the Buddha of the early Buddhist canonical texts specifically denied that he was a god, and that he was a teacher of the truth he perceived at his enlightenment. They find support for this view in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, wherein the Buddha tells his followers that when he dies the teaching and the disciplinary rules he... (shrink)

Practical wisdom is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live. As such, it is a lofty and important ideal to strive for. It is precisely this loftiness and importance that gives rise to important questions about wisdom: Can real people develop it? If so, how? What is the nature of wisdom as it manifests itself in real people? I argue that we can make headway answering these questions (...) by modeling wisdom on expert skill. Presenting the main argument for this expert skill model of wisdom is the focus of this paper. More specifically, I’ll argue that wisdom is primarily the same kind of epistemic achievement as expert decision-making skill in areas such as firefighting. Acknowledging this helps us see that, and how, real people can develop wisdom. It also helps to resolve philosophical debates about the nature of wisdom. For example, philosophers, including those who think virtue should be modeled on skills, disagree about the extent to which wise people make decisions using intuitions or principled deliberation and reflection. The expert skill model resolves this debate by showing that wisdom includes substantial intuitive and deliberative and reflective abilities. (shrink)

My main aim in my thesis is to show that, contrary to the commonly held belief according to which Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop intellectual virtues, there are strong indications that Plato had already conceived and had begun developing the concept of intellectual virtues. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the importance of Aristotle’s work on intellectual virtues. Aristotle developed a much fuller (in detail and argument) account of both, the concept of ‘virtue’ and the concept of ‘intellect’, (...) metaphysically, epistemologically and psychologically. Still, the first conception of intellectual virtues is to be found in the Platonic corpus. Such a realization is not only of historic interest, but most importantly, as I am going to show, the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues could prove promising in contemporary debates on virtue epistemology theories and in virtue-based approaches to education. Plato’s discussion of rational desires is the strongest indication of the presence of the concept of intellectual virtues in Platonic dialogues. Rational desires are constitutive of intellectual virtues: desires are dispositional; rational desires are dispositions to pursue rational goods. Intellectual virtues are such dispositions. Additionally, there is further evidence that Plato had conceived of intellectual virtues. His rigorous educational program in the Republic aims at the development of rational desires, while in the Symposium he discusses the intense rational desire to know the Good. Nevertheless, in order to be intellectually virtuous, one must not only have a desire for knowledge; one must also be systematically and reliably successful in achieving the end of their rational desires. I will show that the success component of Plato’s intellectual virtues can be found in his dialectic method. Plato’s dialectic is both a virtue developer and a reliable method used by philosophers in order to reach the objects of their rational desires. I will argue that episteme is one of Plato’s primary intellectual virtues. Towards this end, I will invoke Pritchard’s recent argument according to which understanding, which is distinct from knowledge, is a form of cognitive achievement and therefore what is finally valuable. I will argue, based on textual evidence from the middle Platonic dialogues and recent discussions in the exegetical literature, that Plato’s episteme, although commonly translated as knowledge, is closer to Pritchard’s conception of understanding. I will also show that Plato’s episteme, similarly to Pritchard’s conception of understanding, is a cognitive achievement that cannot be attained by luck or testimony. The Platonic conception of intellectual virtues has something unique to offer to contemporary virtue epistemology. Plato, unlike Aristotle, does not differentiate between theoretical and practical wisdom. A wise agent, according to Plato, is wise in both practical and theoretical matters. Moreover, Plato, unlike Aristotle does not make a sharp distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Therefore, the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues, in comparison to the Aristotelian, offers a more suitable starting point for scholars who want to argue that intellectual virtues are but a subpart of moral. Furthermore, I will argue that the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues is also of significant merit for virtue-based approaches to education. Plato questioned whether we can attain knowledge but nevertheless went on to develop his Socratically inspired theory of education according to which we can teach learning without knowing. Socrates proclaimed his ignorance numerous times; nevertheless, he went on to educate the youth of Athens. This is what I will suggest that Plato’s notion of intellectual virtues can contribute to theories of education: we should teach children not by transferring knowledge to them directly but by building dispositions into them to seek and acquire the truth. I will argue that although somewhat ignored by contemporary scholars, Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about epistemic character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic method, Plato’s educational program does not “spoon-feed” knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving. The Platonic decades long educational regime aims at training Philosopher-Kings in three types of virtue: (i) Moral Virtue; (ii) the Cognitive Virtue of Abstraction; (iii) the Cognitive Virtue of Debate. I will explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today and I will argue that Plato’s rigorous education program is of definite merit for contemporary theories of education, especially given the fact that scholars in the field are looking for alternatives to the traditional methods of teaching. I will also dedicate a section to showing that Socrates was not a moral philosopher but rather an epistemic character builder. Socrates trained his students/interlocutors in desiring the truth without offering them any knowledge-education. I will also briefly highlight some of the most significant differences between the Platonic educational program, as described in the Republic, and the Socratic educational method. I will also discuss, before concluding my thesis, two different accounts of educational failure as presented by Plato in the Republic. The first one is the individuals employing the eristic method (as a result of failure in dialectic education) and the second is the individuals who correspond to the four imperfect societies (brought about again by the lack of proper education). I will argue that these two accounts can inform our understanding of what should be avoided when educating for epistemic (and moral) virtue nowadays. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 41-62 [Access article in PDF] Pure of Heart: From Ancient Rites to Renaissance Plato Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle The philosopher who published Plato for Western thought praised him strangely. Marsilio Ficino commended his translation of the Phaedrus to his soul mate Iohannes Bessarion because in that dialogue Plato sought from God spiritual beauty. "When this gold was given to Plato by God, (...) it shone in him most brilliantly, because he was so pure in heart." The epithet "pure in heart" is not literally Ficino's diction: he wrote "in his Platonic bosom perfectly clean" (Platonico in sinu utpote mundissimo). 1 Although this philological variant insinuates his full meaning, the modern translation conveys his essential import. Ficino and Bessarion were both scholars and priests, convinced of the compatibility of Platonism with Christianity. The recipient of the letter, Bessarion, had defended the Phaedrusvigorously against protestations that, for promoting the criminal activity of pederasty, it was an obscene work of unchaste philosophy. "Love," he declared, "leads many to beatitude." 2 Ficino emphasized that "no one can attain beatitude, which consists in divine contemplation, unless he loves God ardently." 3 To that end he translated the complete works of Plato into Latin with commentaries. He also composed a speculative Theologia platonica. The pair would have approved of the application to Plato of the gospel promise "Blessed are the pure of heart [hoi katharoi t¯e kardia], for they shall see God" (Matt. 5:8). Was this promise not already fulfilled in Plato, even before Jesus' pronouncement? Did not Socrates in the Phaedrus soar to the vision of God in his myth of the charioteer, where among privileged souls he peered over the rim of intelligible being to behold the divine processional and true being? The [End Page 41] myth figured the recollection of the soul's primordial state of innocence, "when we were pure ourselves," and, beholding "the beatific vision," were initiated into its "most blessed" mystery. 4 Bessarion cited the passage defensively, declaring Socrates' speech "most holy." 5The beatitudes, from which "pure of heart" derived, emphatically comprised the opening discourse of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Jesus blessed the poor in spirit, the mourners, the meek, those hungry and thirsty for righteousness, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted for righteousness. He pronounced a corresponding good for each type (Matt. 5:1-10). The first four beatitudes promised reversals for the unfortunate; the second four, eschatological rewards for the virtuous. 6 Ficino personalized the beatitudes. He applied them in a letter to an archbishop to his own contrasting status as a priest "of humble fortune." Indicating his slight financial means, he affirmed obedience to his lot, even contentment with his meager possessions. He then wielded the divine reversal of human judgment, so startling in the beatitudes, against his enemies. "I am certainly content with few possessions, even though I am often held in contempt by many; for these many ought to be deemed of little worth. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers." 7Ficino also philosophized the beatitudes. He argued in Theologia platonica that, although the celestial realm was usually considered fiery, it could be earthy, as poets imagined the Elysian Fields. Jesus' beatitude promising the possession of the earth to the meek was proof. Ficino expounded the nine grades of celestial beatitude as a belief shared by Platonists and Christians. He assigned these grades to varying degrees and combinations of three ends: the fear of divine power, the search for wisdom, and the love of good, which ultimately transformed the soul. This elaborate division Ficino compared to Jesus' beatitudes. "I think that this mystery is signified in the gospel, where the divine oracle nine times calls his disciples blessed, because through nine grades of merit, with God leading, the nine heavens are sought blessedly through nine degrees of contemplation." Despite his philosophical imposition on the biblical text, Ficino qualified his syncretism. The gospel admonished the dismissal of philosophical meanderings to pursue... (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply ‘wisdom’), which is the understanding required to make reliably good decisions about how we ought to live, is something we all have reason to care about. The importance of wisdom gives rise to questions about its nature: what kind of state is wisdom, how can we develop it, and what is a wise person like? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about proper methods for studying (...) wisdom. Is the study of wisdom the proper subject of philosophy or psychology? How, exactly, can we determine what wisdom is and how we can get it? In this chapter, we give an overview of some prominent philosophical answers to these questions. We begin by distinguishing practical wisdom from theoretical wisdom and wisdom as epistemic humility. Once we have a clearer sense of the target, we address questions of method and argue that producing a plausible and complete account of wisdom will require the tools of both philosophy and empirical psychology. We also discuss the implications this has for prominent wisdom research methods in empirical psychology. We then survey prominent philosophical accounts of the nature of wisdom and end with reflections on the prospects for further interdisciplinary research. (shrink)

A deeply informed exploration of what Stoic ideas have to offer us today Stoicism is the ideal philosophy of life for those seeking calm in times of stress and uncertainty. For many, it has become the new Zen, with meditation techniques that help us face whatever life throws our way. Indeed, the Stoics address a key question of our time: how can we be masters of our fate when the outside world threatens to unmoor our well-being? In Stoic Wisdom, (...) Georgetown philosophy professor Nancy Sherman, an expert in ancient and modern ethics, shows what a practical modern Stoicism really looks like. Drawing on the wisdom of Stoic thinkers Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and others, Sherman paints a portrait that uncovers the true subtlety and power of Stoic ideas. That portrait reveals a truth often ignored: that the Stoics never thought self-sufficiency was only about rugged self-reliance and mental discipline. We are at home in the world, they taught, when we are connected to each other in cooperative efforts. While mastery of one's self is essential, we also must draw on our deepest relationships for true strength and resilience. Bringing these ancient ideas to bear on 21st century environments-from Silicon Valley to first responders in a pandemic, to soldiers on the battlefield-Sherman shows how Stoicism can both prepare us for an uncertain future and help us cope with traumatic events. Stoic Wisdom will appeal to anyone feeling helpless or looking for deeper, meaningful strength and goodness in addressing life's biggest and smallest challenges. (shrink)

Rorty's profound and challenging critique of contemporary philosophy is in several ways somewhat unfair. Analytic philosophy can contribute towards 'wisdom' in a reasonable sense of the term, though not in Rorty's narrow sense; and his contrast between 'sophist' and 'sage', with the latter understood in Plato's way, is also too constricting. Also, some contemporary 'analytic' work in the 'history of philosophy', so called, is not invalidated by Rorty's strictures - especially his implied accusation that we shan't be interested in (...) the intellectual past if we can't look down on it. (shrink)

We are in a state of impending crisis. And the fault lies in part with academia. For two centuries or so, academia has been devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and technological know-how. This has enormously increased our power to act which has, in turn, brought us both all the great benefits of the modern world and the crises we now face. Modern science and technology have made possible modern industry and agriculture, the explosive growth of the world’s population, global (...) warming, modern armaments and the lethal character of modern warfare, destruction of natural habitats and rapid extinction of species, immense inequalities of wealth and power across the globe, pollution of earth, sea and air, even the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). All these global problems have arisen because some of us have acquired unprecedented powers to act, via science and technology, without also acquiring the capacity to act wisely. We urgently need to bring about a revolution in universities so that the basic intellectual aim becomes, not knowledge merely, but rather wisdom – wisdom being the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others, thus including knowledge and technological know-how, but much else besides. (shrink)