Wisdom-Centered Life

 

The Wisdom-Centered Life website provides information on research on wisdom, as well as on the history of wisdom. It also presents a method for developing wisdom (one that is pretty traditional, but utilizes current research on learning theory, skills development, expertise and, of course, wisdom). Wisdom can be cultivated in the same way critical thinking and learning skills can be cultivated. It is the goal of Wisdom-Centered Life to provide methods for developing wisdom that are effective, adequate to the concept, and that can be tested and improved. Wisdom is defined as perceiving reality and doing what is best. Individuals are encouraged to work out their own definition along with a rationale for that definition.
After many years of neglect, wisdom has been receiving attention from the scholarly community. In the West, until the 1950s, there was little interest in wisdom from the fields of theology, philosophy, or psychology. It has only been in recent decades that wisdom has ceased to “vanish almost entirely from the philosophical map” (Smith, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1998). In regard to theology, Walter Brueggemann (1996:182) writes that, "It is fair to say that wisdom studies had, in critical scholarship, been almost completely dormant. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, a vigorous new effort in wisdom studies was undertaken."

 

You can get an idea of the growth of interest in wisdom from checking the entries in the standard indexes. Philosophers’ Index lists 115 articles with wisdom as subject between 1940-1959; 220 between 1960-1979; 161 between 1980-1989; 238 between 1990-1999; 192 between 2000 and listings as of December 2006. PsychINFO finds one article with wisdom as keyword between 1940-1959; 7 between 1960-1979; 13 between 1980-1989; 57 between 1990-1999; 174 from 2000 to December 2006 (searches made December, 2006). A PsychINFO search made Dec 9, 2007 ("wisdom" as keyword, peer reviewed journals) finds 22 articles listed from Dec 2006-Dec 2007.

 

Since the first published empirical study of wisdom in 1980, there have been over 50 more. Check here: Empirical research for descriptions of  these studies.