The paper discusses Lehrer's pioneering approach to the topic of wisdom. His pithy proposal, that wisdom is preference of merit justified by an evaluation system and undefeated by error, fits well within the grand philosophical tradition of thinking about wisdom, offering a very clear and original formulation of its target. The first part of the paper puts it on a map of philosophical options concerning wisdom (anthropo-, theo- and cosmo-centric ones) and then raises questions about it: does preference have to motivate, what is the relation between factual and evaluative knowledge in the evaluation system, and how is the objectivity of merit secured? The second part briefly develops an alternative proposal inspired by Lehrers work. It is a two-level picture. Wisdom combines the virtues of the first-order production of decision and action (reliability and practical validity) with second-order reflective endorsement of the first-order picture. The first-order production yields phronesis-generated action-guiding desires which constitute practical wisdom in the narrow sense, and the second level the more refined and sophisticated wisdom of philosophers and their kin.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19577352
Berčić's proposal for a pluralistic normative account of meaning of life offers a fine point of entry into the problematic of meaningfulness. When given the coherentist twist he briefly suggests, it nicely fits with intuitions of many wise people from classics in philosophy to contemporary psychologists who work on the topic. In this paper we discuss his normative sketch and attempt to supplement it with a sketch of metaphysics and epistemology of meaningfulness along response-dependentist lines. The account proposed here claims that being meaningful in objective sense is being such as to cause the experiential response of meaningfulness in slightly idealized, suitably sensitive observers under suitable circumstances. The response locates the relevant event or item in the space of meaningfulness, analogous to color-space.
COBISS.SI-ID: 20434440
The consequence argument of van Inwagen is widely regarded as the best argument for incompatibilism. Lewis's response is praised by van Inwagen as the best compatibilist's strategy but Lewis himself acknowledges that his strategy resembles that of Lehrer. A comparison will show that one can speak about Lehrer-Lewis strategy, although I think that Lewis's variation is dialectically slightly stronger. The paper provides a response to some standard objections of incompatibilists to the Lehrer-Lewis reply.
COBISS.SI-ID: 19134984
A strong, strictly virtue-based, and at the same time truth-centered framework for virtue epistemology (VE) is proposed, It bases VE upon a clearly motivating epistemic virtue, inquisitiveness or curiosity in a very wide sense, characterizes the purely executive capacities-virtues as means for the truth-goal set by the former, and, finally, situates the remaining, partly motivating and partly executive virtues in relation to this central stock of virtues. Character-traits epistemic virtues are presented as hybrids, partly moral, partly purely epistemic. In order to make the approach virtue-based, it is argued that the central virtue, inquisitiveness or curiosity, is responsible for the value of truth: truth is valuable to cognizers because they are inquisitive, and most other virtues are means for satisfying inquisitiveness. On can usefully combine this virtue-based account of the motivation for acquiring knowledge with a Sosa-style analysis of the concept “knowledge”, which puts in the forefront virtues-capacities, in order to obtain a full blooded, “strong” VE.
COBISS.SI-ID: 17224200
Reaching understanding is one of our central epistemic goals, dictated by our important motivational epistemic virtue, namely inquisitiveness about the way things hang together. Understanding of humanly important causal dependencies is also the basic factual-theoretic ingredient of wisdom on the anthropocentric view proposed in the article. It appears at two levels. At the first level of immediate, spontaneous wisdom, it is paired with practical knowledge and motivation (phronesis), and encompasses understanding of oneself (a distinct level of self-knowledge having to do with one’s dispositions capacities, vulnerabilities, and ways of reacting), of other people, of possibilities of meaningful life, and of relevant courses of events. It is partly resistant to skeptical scenarios, but not completely. On the second and reflective level, understanding helps fuller holistic integration of one’s first order practical and factual-theoretic knowledge and motivation, thus minimizing potential and actual conflicts between all these components. It also participates in the reflective control whose exercise is needed for full reflective wisdom, the crucial epistemic-practical virtue or human excellence.
COBISS.SI-ID: 20520712