By Valerie Tiberius At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk about wisdom. This series of blog posts highlights key questions that emerged from that discussion. Please
By Valerie Tiberius
At end the of July, 2010, a small
group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings,
Minnesota to talk about wisdom. This
series of blog posts highlights key questions that emerged from that
discussion.
Please join our conversation by
commenting on this discussion below. Also, it should be noted that this
workshop was funded by a grant from the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom
Project and the John Templeton Foundation. Thanks are also due to the Minnesota
Center for Philosophy of Science for administrative assistance.
Our
last topic of conversation was the future of the group. It was remarkable, and
extremely gratifying to me, the organizer of the workshop, how much enthusiasm
people felt about meeting again and staying in touch. I don’t think I was alone
in feeling surprised and delighted by the sense of accomplishment and
intellectual excitement that the weekend produced. As the organizer, I have
thought a lot about what made this weekend so successful and such a good
learning experience for us all. My assessment is that it had something to do
with the place – we were in pleasant surroundings, without many distractions,
sharing all our meals and our free time. It had something to do with our having
a sense of a shared project, yet different skills and bases of knowledge. It
also had a lot to do with the people. It seemed to me (speaking for the other
eight participants), that everyone possessed a lack of arrogance and a sincere
willingness to listen to each other, in addition to a sense of humor and
gratitude for the privilege of spending a weekend with smart people talking
about interesting topics in lovely surroundings. The conversation reported here
would not have been the same without these qualities.
Indeed,
enthusiasm about the workshop was so heartfelt that it looks like there will be
a continuation of the “Rosewood Group”. We now have an online resource for
sharing papers and questions, and we hope to have another meeting in 2011. As
can be seen from this report, there are many topics of mutual interest that
could form the basis for future meetings. One possible topic that hasn’t been
mentioned yet, which we discussed very briefly, is the relationship between
wisdom and humor. Everyone seemed to think there is an interesting
relationship. One suggestion was that wisdom and humor draw on the same kinds
of capacities for different purposes. Others seemed to think that sometimes
humor is the wisest response to a situation or that having a wise perspective
on a situation could be facilitated by having a sense of humor. I am optimistic
that whatever particular topics we discuss, we can build on the substantial
agreement about wisdom reached during the Rosewood workshop to make real
progress in the study of wisdom.
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