Imprimatur
← The great ideas

Prudence

Key terms
What it is
How it works
What imitates it
In the commonwealth

Practical wisdom

What is it to decide well about what to do? Practical wisdom is the habit of mind that deliberates well about action. These readings ask how it differs from knowledge of unchanging things and from the skill of making.

3 readings

In chapter 8 of the Book of Proverbs (Douay-Rheims), Wisdom herself speaks, as she does in the chapter’s long discourse. She says “counsel and equity is mine, prudence is mine, strength is mine”, and speaks of kings and lawgivers. It stands under this term as the sapiential books’ naming of prudence beside wisdom.

In Book VI, chapter 5 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines “practical wisdom” (phronēsis), which the Latin tradition renders prudentia. He takes it as the power to “deliberate well” about “the good life in general”. It stands under this term as the founding definition of the virtue.

In the Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part, question 57, article 4, Aquinas asks whether prudence is a virtue distinct from “art”. He cites the Metaphysics to distinguish “making” from “doing”. It stands under this term as the scholastic account of prudence as an intellectual virtue of action.