RT Article
T1 Phronesis, Poetics, and Moral Creativity
JF Ethical theory and moral practice
VO 6
IS 3
SP 317
OP 341
A1 Wall, John 1965-
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2003
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1785692828
AB At least since Aristotle, phronesis (practical wisdom) and poetics (making or creating) have been understood as essentially different activities, one moral the other (in itself) non-moral. Today, if anything, this distinction is sharpened by a Romantic association of poetics with inner subjective expression. Recent revivals of Aristotelian ethics sometimes allow for poetic dimensions of ethics, but these are still separated from practical wisdom per se. Through a fresh reading of phronesis in the French hermeneutical phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur, I argue that phronesis should be viewed as at least in part poetic at its very core. That is, phronesis deals with the fundamentally tragic human situation of moral incommensurability, and it responds to this by making or creating new moral meaning. Such a poetics of practical wisdom helps phronesis stand up to significant and important critiques made of it by a range of modernists and post-modernists, pointing a way forward for some important contemporary moral debates.
K1 Tragedy
K1 Ricoeur
K1 Practical Wisdom
K1 Poetics
K1 Phronesis
K1 Otherness
K1 Ethics
K1 Dialectics
K1 Creativity
K1 Aristotle
DO 10.1023/A:1026063925726