Review Of Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, And Development Edited By R. J. Sternberg

Wisdom contains the views of 19 scholars, from various domains of psychology, education, psychiatry, and gerontology, on the nature of personal wisdom. As a whole, the work is based on the shaky assumption that, because there are words such as wisdom in the Western lexicon, there must be corresponding states of mind to be explored. However, for lack of an obvious object of interrogation, the chapters are unbridled in their conceptual elaborations and very short on agreement. Nevertheless, the quality of the scholarship is uniformly high; the level of historical, cultural, and philosophic sophistication is admirable; and the theoretical elaborations are often interesting and edifying. Even if it is ontologically shaky, it would be unfortunate to lose the concept of wisdom from the cultural vocabulary. This volume does an excellent job in sustaining and enriching that concept. For advanced undergraduates and above