ABSTRACT
Principles of wisdom can be traced to the philosophical and religious thought of ancient cultures, as expressed in the literature of the Old and New Testament, and in the books of pagan antiquity. Wisdom, the supreme virtue of (hu)mankind, was felt to exist as much in the realm of conduct as that of thought. Contemporary thinking tends to examine wisdom from within the domain of cognition and intelligence, but to separate it from objective problem solving. There is little agreement on the defining characteristics of wisdom, but a general consensus exists that wisdom has little or no value in the realm of the objective—that is the domain of science. The collapse of concepts of wisdom into the domain of cognitive psychology reflects the suppression of subjectivity and mimics an underlying cultural confusion between knowledge and sagacity. Relational wisdom is not always expressed in ordinary ways.
