The doctrine of historical supersessionism proposes that the distant past is of no importance to the present. This chapter argues that Positivism, a child of the Enlightenment, and a dominant paradigm in management and organisational research has resulted in the supersessionist rejection of Aristotelian thought. The chapter will draw on Alasdair MacIntyre’s apologia for Aristotle, and the contemporary discovery of phronesis in the social sciences. It will discuss how Gadamer’s hermeneutics of trust can facilitate dialogue between Positivist and Aristotelian scholars. Consequently, Gadamer’s concept can contribute to the study of organisations, artefacts, and practices, as it advocates the necessity for cultivating hermeneutic sensitivity and phronesis in all dimensions of human life. The study also proposes Husserl’s idea of epoché as a methodology to examine historical supersessionism and assist the work of resolving contemporary prejudices and misunderstandings.

This chapter proposes a way of thinking about virtue theory that draws from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, but also moves beyond them. The central question is what a virtue theory might look like which is not universalistic, but rather culturally inclusive, pragmatic, and situational. A theme throughout is the importance of thinking about education as the process through which virtues are formed, sustained, and improved over time.

Prudence is the ability to determine the right course of action for a given situation. The virtue is fundamentally concerned with what we should do to achieve a desired objective, rather than what we should believe. Prudence is also a translation of Aristotle’s concept of phronesis (practical reason), which the Nicomachean Ethics defines as an “excellence of deliberation” (VI.9.9). In his formulation, Aristotle emphasizes the rightness of the ends being pursued, unlike several premodern and modern theories focusing only on the ability to attain desired ends, and which develop a somewhat uneasy relationship between prudence and virtue. Shakespeare makes the ethical challenges of prudence integral to The Merchant of Venice, a play featuring many deliberations over the means to such ends as happiness, wealth, friendship, and love. Throughout the play, Shakespeare takes a largely Aristotelian approach to prudence: characters who “hazard all” to gain noble ends are depicted as the most prudent, while the “shrewd,” who deliberate well but for immoral objectives, inevitably fail. Still, Shakespeare adds a final constraint to the virtue, suggesting that prudence is not a static trait but a dynamic effort to uncover one’s blind spots – and thus a virtue that few can hope to master.

Aristotle’s notion of aretē provides a way of reading Shakespeare’s plays that unifies the characters’ actions in a manner parallel to how ethics unifies humanity. For Aristotle, moral virtue is determined by how completely an individual embodies human nature. As a result there is a sense in which Aristotelian virtue is a selfish endeavor; I strive to fulfill my nature, and in doing so I achieve happiness (eudaimonia). Yet for Aristotle, moral virtue is a political exercise, it is action that ties a person to others. An individual’s role in the state is necessary for the full cultivation of virtue, and hence a requirement for achieving their own selfish end. Shakespeare frequently plays with this tension in Aristotelian virtue: The way characters relate their own good to the good of the state is, by this reading, a way of interpreting the virtue of the characters. Virtuous judgment is not set over universal principles. It is thinking through objects and experience in all their vicissitudes, as characters in a drama have to do. This chapter uses King Lear to demonstrate how Aristotelian moral virtue, and its relation of the individual and the state, can serve as a structuring principle for understanding action.

It is not too difficult to claim, in a cocktail party type of way, that global governance should be more virtuous, and that those who run our lives and our institutions should be decent human beings. That is the easy part, if only because it makes intuitive sense that what could possibly be useful in some settings (professional sports, for example) is not so appropriate in other settings. We accept ruthlessness in our professional athletes – indeed, to the point that it might be difficult for them to become truly exceptional without a ruthless streak. But we do not think that quite the same applies to judges, or high-ranking civil servants, let alone religious leaders. Not even our statespersons, even if we would want them to serve the national interest (whatever that may be), are expected to display quite the same amount or sort of ruthlessness. Michael Jordan and Cristiano Ronaldo may be single-minded and ruthless; the Dalai Lama or the Pope may not, and neither may Germany’s long-serving prime minister Angela Merkel.

We discuss the broad organizational power-structures that regulate the virtues of doing science, the values upheld, and the introduction of novices into the scientific community. Aristotle’s scheme of knowledge is used to introduce the relevance of a value-laden praxis, of phronesis, which is the virtue of ‘doing’. We discuss these ideological issues in the context of classic philosophical notions put forth by Hannah Arendt (and her work on action) and Bruno Latour (and his work on praxis, actor networks, and inscription devices). This chapter thus serves as a broad foundation for analyses of the ways in which scientific virtues are deeply intertwined with the activities of psychological science. It sketches psychology as action-based and virtue-laden, based on the notion of a dynamic praxis consisting of interacting agents.

Chapter abstract (Philosophical Foundations for the Study of Wisdom): A person with practical wisdom reliably grasps how to live and conduct themselves. But what is practical wisdom, how can we get it, and how can we study it? This chapter will introduce some prominent philosophical arguments and answers to these questions. After distinguishing practical wisdom from other types of wisdom, the chapter explains why studying wisdom requires combining both philosophy and empirical science. To illustrate the contribution of philosophy, the chapter motivates a core philosophical conception of wisdom and invites the reader to think through some philosophical puzzles it gives rise to.

Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, wrote of the importance of what he called practical wisdom (phronesis) as a key guide to human action. Practical wisdom is the will to do the right thing in a given situation, and the skill to figure out what the right thing is. This chapter discusses what practical wisdom is, and illustrates why it is needed for successful practice in almost all professions. Will is essential because it keeps professionals on track to pursue the proper aims of a profession (eg., healing the sick and easing suffering, in medicine), and skill is important because every situation is different and professionals need empathy, improvisation, good listening, imagination, and perspective taking to find the actions that each situation requires.

This chapter explores Cavendish’s career as a dramatist by examining the similarities and differences between her two volumes of drama, Playes (1662) and Plays Never Before Printed (1668). One of the plays in the 1668 volume, The Sociable Companions; or the Female Wits, recycles and adapts characters and plot – the story of a character called Prudence and her search for a husband – from The Publick Wooing, a play included in the 1662 volume. This pair of plays provides an opportunity to trace Cavendish’s response to changing theatrical conditions, while also revealing the flexibility of her principles of dramatic composition. By reworking the character of Lady Prudence in The Public Wooing in her later play, Cavendish explores the possibilities and limitations of prudence as a virtue available to women. Further, her recycling of this plot from one play to another reveals the prudential thinking that underlies her own writing and publication practices. Plays Never Before Printed includes two dramatic fragments – “A Piece of a Play” and “Scenes” from The Presence – that highlight the potential for transformation inherent in Cavendish’s dramatic works.

I describes four kinds of knowledge and associate each with distinctive projects. What we generally refer to as positivist IR aspires to what Aristotle calls episteme: scientific knowledge that can be expressed mathematically. Interpretivist approaches aspire to phroēesis, which is best understood as practical knowledge that helps us cope with the world. This distinction cuts across paradigms and is a far more fundamental division.

Gadamer saw hermeneutics as heir to the tradition of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The exercise of phronesis, good practical judgment, helps sustain the solidarities upon which democracy depends. Phronesis is distinguished from techne, technical knowledge. Gadamer is critical of technocratic thinking. Phronesis is closely related to ethos. It has communal dimensions such that it invigorates the ethos of the society and makes possible solidarity. The basis for this is friendship. Friendship involves a life together of reciprocal co-perception.

Christopher Rowe argues that Aristotle in the Eudemian Ethics develops a naturalised account of Socrates’s divine sign: even people lacking in practical wisdom, Aristotle proposes, can act appropriately, and achieve a kind of happiness, because of something divine in them. But this ‘something divine’ is not (as it is for Socrates) a private inner voice, rather a kind of well-naturedness. For Aristotle, goodness is natural. The goodness of human nature explains how it is possible to do the appropriate things even without reasoning, and even do so reliably. This offers Aristotle an answer to a puzzle about our relation to the natural world. Humans, he holds, are good by nature, yet he also holds fully virtuous human beings to be relatively rare: two claims that are hard to reconcile, given Aristotle’s usual view that what occurs ‘by nature’ occurs ‘always or for the most part’. By allowing there to be a level of decency that is achievable through well-naturedness, even by those who lack full virtue, Aristotle can answer this puzzle. If this decency is achieved by many people, then there is, after all, a kind of good human development that occurs by nature and occurs regularly.

Ethical issues are of central importance in the study of discourse, as in other fields. In some respects, these issues are given greater emphasis today than in the past, partly as a result of the rise of ethical regulation, but also because of some fundamental debates among researchers about the politics and ethics of their work. While the issues vary somewhat across the discourse field, here, as elsewhere, there are certain central values that underpin the practical decisions that researchers make. In this chapter, a distinction is drawn between epistemic and non-epistemic values. The first concern the process of enquiry itself – for example, the obligation to pursue worthwhile knowledge, and to do this effectively; to provide sufficient evidence in publications; to be honest about how the research was done; and to engage genuinely with critics. Non-epistemic values include minimizing harm; respecting autonomy; and maintaining reciprocity; and these represent essential constraints on how research is pursued. The chapter examines how all these values relate to discourse research, exploring the complexities involved. It is emphasized that ethicality is not a matter of following a set of rules; rather, it necessarily involves judgment, in which relevant values, along with prudential and methodological considerations, are taken into account, as they relate to the specific situations faced. The chapter ends with a consideration of ethical regulation and the problems generated by the proceduralist approach to research ethics that it tends to encourage.

Here, the authors present two justifications usually cited as sufficient to warrant patients‘ trust in physicians: professional status and individual merit. Whereas in ‘status trust’ professionalism is taken as a guarantor of trustworthiness, in ‘merit trust’ a physician’s trustworthiness is assessed individually. On either account, trust is justified by the physician’s professionalism. ‘Professionalism’ may be defined as ‘acting trustworthily’ in exchange for autonomy of decision-making, whereas trustworthiness refers to ‘competence’ in terms of episteme (theoretical knowledge), techne (craft or skill), and phronesis (practical knowledge or experience), and ‘commitment’ as ‘to act in a way that the truster approves’. The authors argue that although in principle trust in physicians is justified, since both professionalism and individually assessed trustworthiness grant derivative authority, the reality is different. because an increasing number of patients reject the concept of professionalism and, accordingly, find it difficult (or even impossible) to assess physicians’ trustworthiness. Hence, they no longer believe that their trust in physicians is justified.