The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative

Extract

The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, and Narrative. By Leslie Paul Thiele. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 334p. $80.00.

Paul Thiele asks the right question: How should we think about political judgment and, more generally, practical wisdom, understood as an intellectual faculty or virtue that is different from, or at least irreducible to, faculties of logical or scientific reasoning but that remains, nonetheless, a decidedly rational mode of thought in its own right? Such a question defines, arguably, the project of the sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics. And Aristotle's failure to provide there a fully satisfying account of the nature of phronesis—something different from sophia on the one hand, from a merely nonrational knack on the other—establishes the problematic for virtually all subsequent approaches to judgment.