Wisdom Talks

Wisdom, also known as sapience, is the ability to apply expert tacit and experiential knowledge, balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal and institutional interests, to deal with complex questions of life and attain a common good.

Throughout history, wisdom has been regarded as a key virtue in religion and philosophy. Religiously, wisdom is an important element in the Biblical wisdom-tradition - often contrasting human knowledge with divine omniscience, - which was further developed in Christianity and Islam. Philosophically, wisdom has been explored by thinkers from Ancient Greece to modern times, with Greek (Plato) making a distinction between sophia, philosophical and contemplative wisdom regarding the divine order of existence; phronesis, practical wisdom; and episteme, formal or scientific knowledge.

Psychologists have researched wisdom since the late 1970s, starting with exploring folk conceptions of wisdom, and subsequently developing explicit-formal theories of wisdom. Theories that regard wisdom as a developmental cognitive and emotional trait hark back to Erik Eriksons theory of stages of psychosocial development, and Post-Piagetian and neo-Piagetian stages of development. Explicit-formal theories include Robert J. Sternberg's Balance Theory of Wisdom, which explores the relation between intelligence, creativity, and wisdom, and sees wisdom as "the value-laden application of tacit knowledge to attain a common good"; and Paul Baltes' Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, which sees wisdom as a combination of "excellence in mind and virtue" and "an expert knowledge system dealing with the conduct and understanding of life."

From wisdom on Wikipedia