Dove e quando

John Hacker-Wright (University of Guelph)

Practical Wisdom, Extended Rationality, and Human Agency 

This paper defends a neo-Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom as a virtue that enables a human agent to reflect on and direct their life toward virtuous ends over time. This view is sometimes assumed to require commitment to an intellectualist Grand End or blueprint view, on which practical wisdom would require philosophical insight and an implausibly well worked out set of weighted preferences. In this paper I aim to show that particularists can and should take on much of what was thought to belong to the Grand End view. I argue for a conception of practical wisdom as a virtue of extended action that accounts for overarching ends without the need to appeal to an unrealistic, intellectualized blueprint for life. Further, on the view advocated here, as in Aristotle, practical wisdom is a virtue of substantial rationality and distinct capacity from instrumental rationality in that it requires reflection on what constitutes a good human life. But again, I will argue that this is not high-minded philosophical reflection, and in fact something rather mundane that draws on the same rational capacities we deploy to assess the goodness of actions.