Phronesis and the Civic Virtues

Abstract

Abstract While there is renewed interest in phronesis in educational circles, phronesis is almost exclusively discussed in the context of adjudicating between conflicting moral virtues, not between civic virtues. Educationally, phronesis is rarely invoked in the literature on Civic Education. More generally, the relationship between Character Education and Civic Education continues to be marked by a tension, although both forms tend to draw on Aristotle’s corpus. The initial aim of this chapter is to unpack the association between the civic and the moral (characterological) in Aristotle’s writings. The chapter delineates different kinds of primacy in Aristotelian Virtue Ethics and shows how the civic is (teleo)logically prior to the moral, while secondary in a developmental and analytical sense. Moreover, four levels of civic virtue are identified. The ultimate aim of the chapter is to shed light on the relationship between phronesis and the civic virtues: a hitherto underdeveloped topic.