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.McDowell s position is contexualist¹t See Coope, Ch.1: pp.38 9, for the same suggestion. Variety of Life and the Unity of Practical Wisdom 149in that it sees practical wisdom as a capacity acquired in enculturation.Its acquisitionrepresents our coming to occupy the moral point of view, from within which alone moraldemands can be rendered fully perspicuous.practical wisdom is viewed as akin to aperceptual capacity (to discern the good).About this certainly McDowellian, and allegedly Aristotelian, view Bakhurst hasa variety of interesting comments to make.One thing he does not say is thatAristotle so read has no obvious use for the distinction that I stressed in section 3,between moral and intellectual virtues.(Nor does Bakhurst remark, as I would,that Aristotle so read is wide open to the three objections I began with.) Thisseems to me to be an important obstacle to the particularist reading of Aristotle.Here is another problem, which connects with the overall particularist tendencythat I am criticizing to turn practical wisdom into a catch-all virtue.This tendencyis widespread, and not confined to particularists.The popular equation betweenpractical wisdom and something nebulous called judgement is, for instance,accepted unhesitatingly by Thomas Nagel:The fact that one cannot say why a particular decision is the correct one, given aparticular balance of conflicting reasons, does not mean that the claim to correctness ismeaningless.What makes this possible is judgement, essentially the faculty Aristotledescribed as practical wisdom, which reveals itself over time in individual decisions ratherthan in the enunciation of general principles.(Nagel 1979: 135)Maybe there is such a thing as judgement in Nagel s sense an uncodifiableknack for choosing right between conflicting reasons; maybe we even needjudgement in this sense.The problem is that Aristotle certainly never describesphronesis as such a knack.The catch-all or rag-bag view of phronesis is here at itsfull development and has lose contact altogether with anything that Aristotleactually says.Another common (mis-)reading of Aristotle which is popular with particularistshas him saying that practical wisdom determines the aim of life as well as tapros ton skopon.For this reading, see McDowell 1998: 30: Aristotle can equatepractical wisdom both with the perceptual capacity (NE 1142a23 30) and witha true conception of the end (NE 1142b33). McDowell s proof text here is1142b33.But what 1142b33 actually says is that euboulia, deliberative excellence,is defined as a rightness with respect to what is advantageous towards the end,of which practical wisdom is a true grasp (orthotês kata to sympheron pros to telos,hou hê phronesis alêthês hypolêpsis estin).The crucially ambiguous word here isthe underlined hou, of which.Does Aristotle mean that practical wisdom is atrue grasp of the end, or of what is advantageous towards the end? The text can beread either way: Broadie and Rowe, perhaps deliberately, leave it ambiguous.Butsince Aristotle does not say that practical wisdom is a grasp of the end anywhereelse, and explicitly denies that claim at NE 1144a9, it seems much better to takehou as abbreviating tou sympherontos, not tou telous. 150 Timothy ChappellParticularism fails us, both as exegesis of Aristotle and as a way out of ourimpasse.So let us look for something else to fill the gap that has been left bythe demise of the doctrine of the mean.Maybe we can say something else toexplain what practical wisdom is; and maybe this alternative account of practicalwisdom will not face the crushing objections that the doctrine of the mean faces.This is what I shall try to do in sections 8 9.In the process, I too shall gowell beyond Aristotle.But at least I shall be frank about this; and at least I shallbegin from something Aristotle does actually say, that practical wisdom s mostcharacteristic realisation is good deliberation (to eu bouleuesthai) (NE 1141b11),and say nothing (so far as I can see) that is inconsistent with what Aristotle says.My suggestion is that, to understand the specific work of practical wisdom,what we need to do is take a closer look at what deliberation involves.Toscrutinize this, I turn from Aristotle to Hume [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]