@article{THESIS,
      recid = {12866},
      author = {Brown, Gregory David},
      title = {The Use of Reason: An Essay on Practical Wisdom},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2024-08},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {Practical rationality is, <i>inter alia</i>, a disposition  to reason well about one’s actions. This dissertation  develops a neo-Aristotelian account of practical  rationality by considering what such a disposition must be  like. Accordingly, it begins with a treatment of the nature  of reasoning. Recent treatments of reasoning have distorted  what it is to reason well, since they treat reasoning as a  process that conforms, or ought to conform, to rules of  reasoning. To the contrary, I defend the Aristotelian idea  that reasoning is a species of inquiry. As a species of  inquiry, reasoning proceeds <i>ad hoc</i>, by way of the  reasoner’s remembering and noticing what is salient for the  addressing of some question. What conforms to rules is not  the process of reasoning but rather the rationale on the  basis of which the reasoner responds to her question. In  the remainder of the dissertation, I provide an account of  such rationales, that is, of the structure of practical  justification, by developing a form of neo-Aristotelian  ethical naturalism indebted to the later work of Philippa  Foot. On a properly conceived naturalism, I argue, virtuous  agents are moved not by facts about human nature but by  salient features of their situations, and indeed they come  to know human nature only from the inside, in the  experience of virtuous motivation.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/12866},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.12866},
}