Tuesday 5th November 2024, 2.30pm – 4.00pm (London GMT)
Professor Blaine Fowers (University of Miami)
Title: Assessing Wisdom and the Place of Intellectual Humility
Abstract:
This talk will examine two ways to understand the connection between wisdom and intellectual humility (IH) and present an argument for intellectual humility as a separate virtue that is guided by the meta-virtue of practical wisdom. Both practical wisdom and IH have been studied empirically with supportive results. The wisdom research tradition in psychology is about 40 years old and its first period was characterized by the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm (BWP) and the Balance Theory of Wisdom. The self-report period followed, focused on concrete views of wisdom, self-report measurement, and took wisdom to be a trait rather than a process. Many include IH in wisdom, one way to connect wisdom and IH. The Aristotelian turn is the most recent, with less reliance on simple self-assessment. This talk will focus on the Aristotelian Phronesis Model, which assesses wisdom as a process with self-report and performance measures. I argue that IH is a trait and therefore has no place in a process model of wisdom.
