ABSTRACT
Recently philosophers and psychologists have joined forces to further explore and better understand virtue and its roles in our lives. We (Wright and Warren, psychologists, and Snow, a philosopher) have been engaged in efforts to understand how virtue can be measured. In doing so, we have not neglected roles for practical wisdom (phronesis), which is thought by Aristotelians to be necessary for virtue. In this chapter, we explain features of practical wisdom as explicated by neo-Aristotelian philosopher Daniel C. Russell in terms of the mechanisms of Whole Trait Theory, a social-cognitivist psychological theory that we believe is best suited to understanding virtue in empirical terms. This has the advantages of making practical wisdom less mysterious to psychologists and potentially more amenable to measurement.
