Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 112, Issue 3, 2020

Abstract Against the dominant trends of the scientification and naturalization of philosophy and the concurrent reduction of traditions of practical wisdom to private opinions, this article pleads for a revaluation of philosophy’s original relation with wisdom. It does so by shedding a philosophical light on several related aspects of wisdom through three different lenses. The first one, taken from Aristotle, explores the relation betwe Read More

Abstract Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy pays little explicit attention to the concept of ‘wisdom’ in its taxonomy of the functions of human reason in its work of rendering intelligible the world and the human place in the world. On the basis of some crucial texts in Kant’s writings, this essay argues that wisdom has a role to play in the task Kant assigns to practical reason; this task is to make the world in which humans Read More

Abstract In the present essay, wisdom is conceived as the basic knowledge that underpins all forms of humanising knowledge and the striving for justice. The idea of wisdom as indispensable to all human endeavours is one that can be found in the works of Plato and Cicero. In ancient writings, we also see that wisdom is traditionally opposed to hubris. Hence, following Gabriel Marcel, the quest for wisdom can be regarded as an Read More

Abstract This paper takes up some themes in Peter Jonkers’s essay, ‘Philosophy and Wisdom’, but discusses, more specifically, philosophy as ‘love of wisdom’. After a short summary of what is commonly understood by wisdom, why people value wisdom, and how one may acquire wisdom, I briefly note why the philosophy that we generally encounter today has seemed, to some, to be disconnected from wisdom and the love Read More

Abstract Securing a future for philosophy and wisdom in the professionalized and specialized context of twenty-first century academia is the challenge taken up by this article. If the conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom expects too much of philosophers, the construal of philosophy as the study of wisdom expects too little. To attempt to rehabilitate the relationship between philosophy and wisdom by claim Read More

Abstract This article introduces the Chinese conception of wisdom by a focus mainly on the famous discussion in Mencius. It emphasizes that everything is a change, that changes toward wisdom are natural (or in the case of Xunzi, humane), and that people are always changing toward or away from what is wise. In contrast to much Western thought, wisdom is a response to external things, not to an internal marker. Moreo Read More

Abstract This essay sketches some of the main characteristics of a perennial and cross-civilizational concept of wisdom. It argues that the latter is based upon a strong and deep sense of transcendence and upon the discernment that flows from it. This essay highlights the ways in which this discriminative wisdom does not amount to any form of dualism, but, on the contrary, leads its proponents and practitioners to an all-enc Read More