ABSTRACT
Aquinas thinks that there are intellectual virtues as well as moral virtues, and he takes wisdom to be chief among them. His account of wisdom constitutes a rich contribution not only to ethics but also to philosophy of mind. His discussion, however, is set in a web of medieval lore, about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the beatitudes, the cardinal vices, and so on; and it also presupposes his theory of the relations between intellect and will, some but not all of which has been touched on in a previous chapter. In order to capture what is plausible and explanatorily useful about Aquinas’s account of wisdom, therefore, it is necessary to approach it with a wide-angle lens, including both an examination of his theory of the will’s control over belief and a consideration of the larger philosophical and theological context in which his account is lodged.
