The Nature and Function of Practical Wisdom in its Assessment to Theoretical Wisdom

Practical wisdom is a theorematic discipline of knowledge not only different from practical disciplines of knowledge but also from theoretical wisdom. From one side, it is different from the former which might be mentioned as the disciplines of professions and skills, since practical wisdom is a syllogistic discipline about man’s voluntary acts in the course of man’s happiness, i.e. it infers the general rules of dispositional habits through syllogism and thinking. And from another side, it is different from the latter because it deals with what there is thus irrelevant to man’s voluntary acts; propositions of what there is are not characterized by good or evil nor they have value judgments.
That wisdom is divided into theoretical and practical categories stems from the fact that man’s nature has two dimensions. That is to say, viewing man’s incorporeal soul and connection to the metaphysical world man enjoys theoretical wisdom, and viewing the attachment of the soul to the body and the management of the latter by the former man enjoys practical wisdom.
In order to reach its goal i.e. man’s happiness, practical wisdom needs theoretical wisdom, because the discourse on what man’s happiness is falls in two sections of theoretical wisdom: the study of soul and that of final cause. Thus we might consider practical wisdom as complementary to the theoretical one and in line with it. Practical wisdom has two other valuable functions: first it is the origin of theorematic humanities and second it helps set up a rational system for religious doctrines.