Concept
Prudence
Overview
ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
We talk of the prudence of the great general, of the great statesman, of the great legislator. Prudence is, in all these cases, combined with many greater and more splendid virtues, with valour, with extensive and strong benevolence, with a sacred regard to the rules of justice, and all these supported by a proper degree of self-command. This superior prudence, when carried to the highest degree of perfection…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
Names Prudence several times; states what Prudence is.
We are not to present it as necessary for an uncertain and merely possible purpose, but for a purpose which we may presuppose with certainty and a priori in every man, because it belongs to his being. Now skill in the choice of means to his own greatest well- being may be called prudence [The word prudence is taken in two senses; in the one it may bear the name of knowledge of the world, in the other that of private…
Michel de Montaigne, Literary and Philosophical Essays
Names Prudence several times; states what Prudence is.
What are called duties to ourselves are not socially obligatory, unless circumstances render them at the same time duties to others. The term duty to oneself, when it means anything more than prudence, means self-respect or self-development; and for none of these is any one accountable to his fellow-creatures, because for none of them is it for the good of mankind that he be held accountable to them.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
States what Prudence is; the author is tied to Prudence in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Prudence
- Theodorus the Atheist
- John Stuart Mill
- Siger of Brabant
- Leo Strauss
- Thomas Aquinas
- Antiochus of Ascalon
- David Gauthier
- Nazzareno Camilleri
Related ideas
- Epicurus
- God in Christianity
- Hans-Georg Gadamer
- Insight
- Rhetoric (Aristotle)
- Ancient Greek philosophy
- Just war theory
- Christian philosophy
- Malcolm X
- Niccolò Machiavelli
- Thomas Aquinas
- Natural law
- Knowledge
- Risk
- Rhetoric
- Golden mean (philosophy)
- Aristotle
- Old French
- Scholasticism
- De Oratore
- Reason
- Morality
- Temperance (virtue)
- Wisdom
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Conservatism.