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2 - Philosophical Foundations of Wisdom

from Part I - Foundations of Wisdom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2019

By
Jason Swartwood  and
Valerie Tiberius
Edited by
Robert J. Sternberg  and
Judith Glück
Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Judith Glück
Affiliation:
Universität Klagenfurt, Austria
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Summary

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, what is a person who has it like, and how can we develop it? These questions about the nature of wisdom give rise to further questions about the 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. We then address questions of method and argue that a plausible and complete method for studying wisdom will have to combine philosophical and empirical methods, and we 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 interdisciplinary research on wisdom.
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The Cambridge Handbook of Wisdom , pp. 10 - 39
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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