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Renowned philosopher John Kekes develops and defends a humanistic conception of wisdom as a personal attitude--one that guides how we face adversities and evaluate the often conflicting possibilities and limits of life in the context in which we live. The book is a radical departure from traditional works on wisdom. It stresses the humanistic, pluralistic, and personal aspects of wisdom. The book is a defense of philosophy as a humanistic discipline.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Human Wisdom: Initial Conception
- Chapter 2: Approaches to Wisdom
- Chapter 3: Two Assumptions
- Chapter 4: Perennial Problems
- Chapter 5: Wisdom: The Emerging Conception
- Chapter 6: Basic Assumptions
- Chapter 7: Reflective Understanding
- Chapter 8: Depth
- Chapter 9: Wisdom: The Concluding Conception
- Last Words
About the author
John Kekes was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at SUNY Albany, and is now Research Professor at Union College, Schenectady, New York. His latest books are Enjoyment (2008), The Human Condition (2010), Hard Questions (2019) all from Oxford University Press, and How Should We Live (2014) from Chicago University Press. He was Visiting Professor in Estonia, Singapore, Hungary, Canada, Portugal, and the United States Military Academy.
Summary
In this book, renowned philosopher John Kekes develops and defends a humanistic conception of wisdom as a personal attitude--one that can guide how we face adversities and evaluate the often conflicting possibilities and limits of life in the context in which we live.
Wisdom includes basic assumptions about the concrete and constantly changing conditions of life; reflective understanding of how we can rely on reason to evaluate the possibilities open to us and recognize the limits we have no choice but to accept; and it includes depth that enables us to accept that perennial problems are part of the human condition and yet to restrain our false hopes and disenchanted reactions to the vicissitudes of life.
The evaluative attitude of wisdom is personal, not theoretical; anthropocentric, not metaphysical; context-dependent, not universal; and humanistic, not scientific. It recognizes that there are many forms of worthwhile lives, and denies that there is one ideal of The Good that everyone should try to approximate. It accepts that all of our beliefs, emotions, and desires are fallible, yet they are correctable provided we are sufficiently critical of them. The resulting conception of wisdom is intended as a contribution to philosophy as a humanistic discipline. It is a radical departure from traditional ways of thinking about wisdom.
Additional text
In a deep and subtle examination of our condition, John Kekes shows how it is possible to live wisely, even when confronted with competing visions of what a good life might consist in. For Kekes, rather than assuming that there is one unitary Good over-riding all others, wisdom involves recognising our contingency while cultivating our moral imagination. This we can do by drawing on the historical and cultural traditions we inherit, as Kekes shows by a sensitive use of literature and philosophy. Kekes's achievement in his book is to intimate how each one of us, while sensitive to the demands of our own contingency and history, may transform the commonplace of our own lives, thus moving towards a form of wisdom worth striving for.
