Phronesis for Eudaimonia

I'm not writing much at the moment as I'm in the process of jusggling projects, writing a chapter, going through the motions of a full-time teaching job and opening my company. It's very exciting. I wanted to call my company Phronesis, but there's already a company called Pronesis in Portugal so that name was refused.

I love the name Phronesis. It's one of two intellectual virtues that Aristotle talked about: sophia and phronesis. Sophia is related to thinking about the world and why it is the way it is. It's about universal truths and scientific knowledge whereas phronesis is personal and experiential. It's about thinking how and why we should act to change things, especially our own lives for the better. I've started reading Back to the Rough Ground, edited by John Dunne ("Phronesis" and "Techne" in Modern Philosophy and in Aristotle) where there is a great opening citation from Ludwig Wittgenstein:

"We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!"

Anyway, as I couldn't have Phronesis I chose the name Eudaimonia, which is the end that Phronesis is trying to achieve. Although some people have translated eudaimonia as happiness, it means much more than that. It's about flourishing and a complete life, manifesting in characteristics like courage, honesty, pride, friendliness and wittiness. It also includes friendships and intellectual knowledge. It connects human nature with reason, emotion, perception, and action in an ensouled body. For that I'm reading Essays on Aristotle's ethics, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, (a book which is driving me crazy because it's got no index).

Anyway, the idea of opening a company is the place for doing my projects related to learning in distributed communities in a quest for social inclusion. These projects have overtaken my day-to-day job in terms of my identity and own learning journey and self-development. So the names phronesis and eudaimonia reflect my current practice as well as my  epistemology and research.

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