Reclaiming Competence For Professional Phronesis

According to Dunne (1999), phronesis is Aristotle’s special virtue. It is the virtue that straddles cognition and emotion and provides guidance for the expression of other virtues. In this chapter, I offer a brief outline of the nature of phronesis before rehearsing the claim that phronesis has a special place in professional life. This claim for a professional phronesis is set within a discussion that acknowledges the influence of Schön’s (1983) critique of technical rationality on the way professionals think about their practice in general and on the way in which professional knowledge is conceived in particular. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.