Nath, Oushinar;
(2024)
Wisdom, Action, and Knowledge.
The Journal of Value Inquiry
10.1007/s10790-024-09989-2.
(In press).
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Abstract
An important debate in the current philosophy of wisdom is whether propositional knowledge is necessary for wisdom. Most of the debate, however, has been focused on discussing wisdom as a character trait. This paper contributes to the debate by discussing wisdom as a property of actions and defends what I shall call the knowledge view: propositional knowledge is necessary to explain wise actions. The standard view among philosophers (e.g., Kekes 1983, 2020; Nozick 1981; Whitcomb 2011; Grimm 2015; Tsai 2022) is that wisdom is a virtue which is intimately connected to wellbeing – be it in terms of being in a cognitive state, the contents of which are the goals of wellbeing and the ways to reach them, and/or an ability to perform actions appropriate to reaching the goals of wellbeing. In line with the standard view, I shall take wise actions to be those that somehow relates to the goals of wellbeing. Both consequentialism and Aristotelianism describe how such a relation can pan out. I shall not take sides and, for the sake of the paper, assume both and see how my thesis stands irrespective of which side of the debate one decides to take. With this thought, I’ve organised the paper as follows. §1 discusses the two modal features of wise actions: counterfactual robustness and rational robustness. §2 argues that knowledge explains these two modal features. §3 examines two epistemic accounts vogue in current philosophical literature that may plausibly explain wise actions. §4 discusses whether knowledge is also sufficient to explain wise actions.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Wisdom, Action, and Knowledge |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1007/s10790-024-09989-2 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10790-024-09989-2 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197374 |
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