Phronesis as moral decathlon: contesting the redundancy thesis about phronesis

Abstract

Phronesis or practical wisdom–Aristotle’s intellectual meta-virtue of discernment, deliberation, and arbitration–is undergoing a revival. Yet phronesis enthusiasts have recently been experiencing blowback both from philosophers and psychologists who think that phronesis has been given an inflated role in recent theorizing and that the functions it is meant to perform can more readily and parsimoniously be accorded to less complex–and better researched–psycho-moral constructs. We refer to this as “the redundancy thesis” about phronesis, drawing upon two recent incarnations of it, by a philosopher (Miller) and a psychologist (Lapsley). The aim of this article is to contest this redundancy thesis about phronesis. In Section 2, we delineate the neo-Aristotelian concept of phronesis under scrutiny. Section 3 analyses the redundancy thesis, especially as formulated by Lapsley. Section 4 then offers an unusual twist, by turning the attention to the nature of a particular Olympic sport: decathlon. We elicit various analogies between the nature and development of decathlon as a composite, yet integral, athletic event and the (presumed) nature and development of phronesis as a composite, yet integral capacity. Section 5 finally teases out some possible implications of those analogies for the redundancy thesis.