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>>>>>>>>..........I am pretty sure wisdom can not be taught. That may be, but there have been attempts to teach it. Buddhist monks and their meditation thats in part about gaining wisdom; and all of that sort of thing has been incorporated into the thriving industry of "personal development." On the Education front, it used to be that Euclidean Geometry was taught in the way of rigorous mathematical proofs as training to get people to think Logically. Thats been dropped, and I think a lot of people nowadays don't think logically. On the Science front, the unified field theory approach has been dropped (from its classical physics beginnings). Regards Roger ----- Original Message ----- From: "Drs.W.T.M. Berendsen" <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2006 4:40 PM Subject: Re: What next? Mat and others, Once again, I am pretty sure wisdom can not be taught. Knowledge can, but wisdom not. Wisdom is a part of the individual and like I said someone has it or does not have it. Anyone not agreeing to that statement should just put his effort in just picking someone or just pick whatever bunch of people from the street and make them wise. I wish them a lot of success in that case. The phrase on the left hand column of the website of friends of wisdom “This is an association of people sympathetic to the idea that academic inquiry should help humanity acquire more wisdom by rational means.” Does not tell anything about helping people acquiring wisdom. At first instance not, a least that is my perception of the sentence. I is quite generally about helping humanity to acquire more wisdom. In my point of view we still have to decide on the means. Whether that will be only the people or also information resources like f.i. the Internet. And which people we would like to gather more wisdom and through what means. Whether it is about more wisdom or about acquiring wisdom (which is not possible in my opinion since I regard wisdom as something a person has and being wise as a certain level of wisdom which is different for each person to call someone wise since the definition wise is also a relative definition). But, that is my opinion based on what I regards as wise and wisdom. To me wisdom also has to do with personal capabilities and to me yes of course people have it or have it not. It is mostly agreed upon that most people in the madhouse do not have wisdom normally speaking. Although some might have it at certain clear moments, but then again it has to be a capacity of that person. So that is why I remark about facilitation rather then teaching wisdom. Knowledge can be teached and leads to more wisdom and a wiser person. But wisdom itself like I define it for myself can not be teached in any way. Karl Popper does mention it also in his excellent book "the open society and its enemies" that some people "see" things and others are "blind" for it. That remark of him had no direct connection with wisdom, but I think the general capacity to "see" things does. Wisdom for sure has to be valued, cherished and encouraged and I suppose all the people here agree on that otherwise we would not be on this list. Mat, you are referring to "your" definition of wisdom. Which is probably a mixture of the definitions of other people and some anotherness of yourself. But I would be interested to know that definition? “Wisdom is taken to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. It includes knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, and much else besides.” I fully agree also with the definition above. Kind regards from the Netherlands, Wilfred Berendsen -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.392 / Virus Database: 268.5.6/338 - Release Date: 12-5-2006