All things considered, I don't have very much to say that I think anyone would want to read, so I think I'll use this space as another place to present my work. Honestly, I doubt very many people will read it, but even if just one other person is exposed to what I write, I think it would be pretty cool.
So by work, what I mean is my written work. At the moment I am a once again college student. I ended up having to close the doors to my buisness due to the recession. Once that happened, I searched through my options and realized that going back to school was the best choice...
You know... all of that sounds pretty dry and boring...
It goes like this: We had 5 contracts out with various municipalities, all of them reneged, I tried to keep things running without any real work coming in for a year, I ran out of money, no one would hire me [I was either over or under qualified for /everything/] and I figured going back to school was the best option, all things considered.
Anyways with all of that said, I'll go ahead and post a piece of my work:
The problem with defining wisdom
At the end of the article on wisdom by Sharon Ryan located on the Stanford Encyclopedia site, Ryan concludes that a general understanding of the nature of wisdom is as such:
S is wise iff:
1) S has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge.
2) S knows how to live well.
3) S is successful at living well.
4) S has very few unjustified beliefs.
[Ryan 1]
I understand, after reading over her entry, the desire she has to have a definition that holds each of the premises, as she is answering certain concerns located within previous definitions of wisdom, such as the ideas of the humility theories and such [Ryan 1].
The 1st problem: Too much luck
Honestly, it is my opinion that the theory that Ryan has set forth relies a little too much on luck. Condition three is a perfect example of this. According to ones personal definition, an agent [S] may or may not be living well due to various factors out of their control. If one is born at the lowest tier of the economic scale, would someone such as Ryan ever look at that person and honestly believe that [S] is successful at living well?
Likewise, isnt it probable that a Paris Hilton would look upon the life conditions of someone such as Ryan [I am assuming that Ryan is an average academic in this example] and reject that a person in academia could be successful at living well?
Of course this view could be un-courteous to Ryan as she does point toward Nozick for a definition on the aspect of what it takes to live well, but even in its abstractedness, it is still vulnerable to the concept that living well could have a multitude of definitions and no way to reconcile them. Whats worse, after working on my end of term project, I have met a few people that I would consider wise and leading flourishing lives, yet I shrink from the idea that they are living well as their illness has noticeably taken something away from their quality of life
It seems that condition two and three suffers from an extreme amount of vagueness, to the point of being ludicrous. Let us assume that we hold a vague idea of what the good is, which by itself is another debate entirely. To know what the good life entails we would have to come from our assumed definition of the good and then entrench ourselves in a definitional warfare that would have to account for various cultures, implications, religions and more. To be blunt, I dont think one could even begin to satisfactorily designate what the good life is in such a way that it would entail everything that could be considered the good life.
I point out this as it seems that if an agent were wise, it would be an aspect to that agent that would be apparent to more than just the people who agree with the agent on what living well entails.
The 2nd problem: Wise yet illiterate?
Condition one states the need for knowledge to be wise [Ryan 1]. I do grant Ryan that it seems that an agent should be in possession of a certain level or kind of knowledge before being considered wise, but it seems that extensive is a bit strong for such an explanation.
Granted, in the world of philosophers as Ive seemed to have noticed, there is this strain of elitism present. There appears this overwhelming need for many people to browbeat others with their intellect, and yet I have difficulty believing that many of these individuals are on the correct road to wisdom.
A person that comes to mind is my grandfather. This is a man that I would claim to be wise, or at least in possession of a certain type of wisdom. The man has a high school education and quite a bit of mechanics certificates and whatever schooling those certificates require, but the man learned quite a bit of this in the Air Force as he never attended a university. My grandfather has a certain type of earthy wisdom in which I have trusted with a number of issues, yet it would seem that under condition one that he would not be in possession of wisdom.
Let us take this a step further and ask about people who lived centuries ago, back when most of the population was illiterate. Would this mean that the only wise people in existence were the academics and the bourgeois? I am uncomfortable with such an assumption and with what I believe is good reason. I have met a number of educated people who fit condition one, yet they were by far the most unwise individuals Ive ever known.
Overall, I understand what Ryan is trying to accomplish, and I applause her courage at doing so. It just doesnt seem that what wisdom entails can be couched so comfortably in the terms of academia as she is attempting. There seems to be qualities involved that her conditions touch upon, but dont actually represent.
Sharon Ryan, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/
So by work, what I mean is my written work. At the moment I am a once again college student. I ended up having to close the doors to my buisness due to the recession. Once that happened, I searched through my options and realized that going back to school was the best choice...
You know... all of that sounds pretty dry and boring...
It goes like this: We had 5 contracts out with various municipalities, all of them reneged, I tried to keep things running without any real work coming in for a year, I ran out of money, no one would hire me [I was either over or under qualified for /everything/] and I figured going back to school was the best option, all things considered.
Anyways with all of that said, I'll go ahead and post a piece of my work:
The problem with defining wisdom
At the end of the article on wisdom by Sharon Ryan located on the Stanford Encyclopedia site, Ryan concludes that a general understanding of the nature of wisdom is as such:
S is wise iff:
1) S has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge.
2) S knows how to live well.
3) S is successful at living well.
4) S has very few unjustified beliefs.
[Ryan 1]
I understand, after reading over her entry, the desire she has to have a definition that holds each of the premises, as she is answering certain concerns located within previous definitions of wisdom, such as the ideas of the humility theories and such [Ryan 1].
The 1st problem: Too much luck
Honestly, it is my opinion that the theory that Ryan has set forth relies a little too much on luck. Condition three is a perfect example of this. According to ones personal definition, an agent [S] may or may not be living well due to various factors out of their control. If one is born at the lowest tier of the economic scale, would someone such as Ryan ever look at that person and honestly believe that [S] is successful at living well?
Likewise, isnt it probable that a Paris Hilton would look upon the life conditions of someone such as Ryan [I am assuming that Ryan is an average academic in this example] and reject that a person in academia could be successful at living well?
Of course this view could be un-courteous to Ryan as she does point toward Nozick for a definition on the aspect of what it takes to live well, but even in its abstractedness, it is still vulnerable to the concept that living well could have a multitude of definitions and no way to reconcile them. Whats worse, after working on my end of term project, I have met a few people that I would consider wise and leading flourishing lives, yet I shrink from the idea that they are living well as their illness has noticeably taken something away from their quality of life
It seems that condition two and three suffers from an extreme amount of vagueness, to the point of being ludicrous. Let us assume that we hold a vague idea of what the good is, which by itself is another debate entirely. To know what the good life entails we would have to come from our assumed definition of the good and then entrench ourselves in a definitional warfare that would have to account for various cultures, implications, religions and more. To be blunt, I dont think one could even begin to satisfactorily designate what the good life is in such a way that it would entail everything that could be considered the good life.
I point out this as it seems that if an agent were wise, it would be an aspect to that agent that would be apparent to more than just the people who agree with the agent on what living well entails.
The 2nd problem: Wise yet illiterate?
Condition one states the need for knowledge to be wise [Ryan 1]. I do grant Ryan that it seems that an agent should be in possession of a certain level or kind of knowledge before being considered wise, but it seems that extensive is a bit strong for such an explanation.
Granted, in the world of philosophers as Ive seemed to have noticed, there is this strain of elitism present. There appears this overwhelming need for many people to browbeat others with their intellect, and yet I have difficulty believing that many of these individuals are on the correct road to wisdom.
A person that comes to mind is my grandfather. This is a man that I would claim to be wise, or at least in possession of a certain type of wisdom. The man has a high school education and quite a bit of mechanics certificates and whatever schooling those certificates require, but the man learned quite a bit of this in the Air Force as he never attended a university. My grandfather has a certain type of earthy wisdom in which I have trusted with a number of issues, yet it would seem that under condition one that he would not be in possession of wisdom.
Let us take this a step further and ask about people who lived centuries ago, back when most of the population was illiterate. Would this mean that the only wise people in existence were the academics and the bourgeois? I am uncomfortable with such an assumption and with what I believe is good reason. I have met a number of educated people who fit condition one, yet they were by far the most unwise individuals Ive ever known.
Overall, I understand what Ryan is trying to accomplish, and I applause her courage at doing so. It just doesnt seem that what wisdom entails can be couched so comfortably in the terms of academia as she is attempting. There seems to be qualities involved that her conditions touch upon, but dont actually represent.
Sharon Ryan, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/