Corbett Lecture 2024

with Gabriel Richardson Lear

The craft models of practical wisdom developed by Plato and Aristotle are, in many ways, like modern conceptions of instrumental rationality. All are teleological, requiring one to reason backwards from the goal or objective. However, Aristotle's recommendation to focus our lives on the single, highest good often strikes modern readers as "obsessive" and unwise. In this paper I will explore Aristotle's and Plato's comparison of the wise reasoner to an archer in the hopes of shifting our perspective. Despite apparent similarities to modern decision theory, these philosophers' models of practical wisdom make fundamentally different assumptions about what style of thinking counts as wise. We should think about images of rationality, and not only about theories.

Followed by a reception in the Museum of Classical Archaeology