The purpose of this project was to provide a psychologically based analysis of the concept of wisdom. Although wisdom has long been used to label competent people, psychologists have largely ignored wisdom in favour of such variables as intelligence. This study used a prototype analysis procedure to identify the attributes that characterize wise people together with the descriptors for intelligent, perceptive and other types of individuals. This served as a basis for describing wisdom and differentiating it from other competency descriptors. The study also examined generational differences in conceptions of wisdom and assessed the manner in which the prototype for wisdom influenced information processing. The project was divided into three studies. In Study I, groups of fifty young adults, middle aged adults and elderly adults provided descriptions of wise, intelligent and other types of individuals. In Study II, groups of subjects representing the same age cohorts rated the descriptors for wise people. An additional group of subjects rated descriptors associated with other categories. In Study III, thirty-eight young adults were administered a recognition memory task to assess the biasing effects of prototype descriptors. The results of Studies I and II indicated that wisdom is a well-defined, prototypically organized concept. Reliability analyses indicated within and between cohort agreement on the characteristics of wise people. Examination of overlap between categories indicated that wisdom was largely independent of other competency descriptors. A principal components analysis yielded five factors, which were labelled "Exceptional Understanding," "Judgement and Communication Skills," "Basic Competency," "Interpersonal Skills," and "Social Unobtrusiveness." The results of Study III indicated that people's memory processes were influenced by the prototypes of wise people. The evidence from Studies I, II and III suggest that wisdom may be viewed as a prototypically organized concept. These results both replicate previous studies and provide a more complete picture of the characteristics and abilities of wise people. The results are interpreted within a theory of development which emphasizes several factors that may contribute to the emergence of wisdom. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Many of today's children find themselves with an unprecedented amount of freedom to choose what sort of life to pursue. A corollary of this freedom however is the burden of sorting through the many options which life offers. Without some guidance in wading through this values-minefield, some children simply become stuck, unable to choose or to choose well. What is a good life? What sorts of goods in life ought we to pursue? These questions motivate the present project but they are not ones which I attempt to answer. Instead, I examine the kinds of tools that could help students to answer such questions in a thoughtful, intelligent and caring way. In order to live a good life, we need to choose well regarding what is valuable. In this thesis I argue that such a process, choosing well about what is valuable, is the result of wisdom. Wisdom is that set of characteristics which allows us to live well. This thesis is the development and justification of this conception of wisdom. It explores how wisdom is related to three key concepts: knowledge, value and morality. I do not argue that this is the only way to think about wisdom. However, it is a way of thinking about wisdom which could usefully and justifiably find a place in the educational system of a liberal democratic state. This thesis is an attempt to understand how educators can teach for the most important goal in life: how to live well. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

Wisdom is very difficult to study due to the complexity of defining wisdom outright. Various models propose characteristics of individuals that are perceived as wise but wisdom finds its real application in decision making. People would characterise someone as wise if they believe that the decision made by the person (the manager in this instance) is informed by the values of all stakeholders and have long term validity. With increasing demands placed on managers to make decisions in contexts where various stakeholders and the natural environment have to be taken into consideration, managers have to make increasingly complex decisions. The decision then also has to take into consideration the values, beliefs and needs of the employees. By asking respondents to rate their manager‟s level of wisdom, why they perceive their managers as wise and what constitutes employee engagement in their minds, a relationship between employee engagement and the perception of wisdom can be deduced. The evidence suggests that especially the cognitive and emotional dimensions of employee engagement are correlated with the perception of wisdom of the manager. New models for the measurement of implicit wisdom and employee engagement are proposed. Copyright / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Magister Scientiae Dentium - MSc(Dent) / Aim: A clinical trial to determine the post-operative outcomes of a PRF-treated socket versus a conventionally treated socket following surgical removal of third molar teeth. Introduction: Third molar surgery is a procedure many have to endure and which often results in prolonged healing time with consequential absence from work and school. This has motivated clinicians to seek methods to enhance the healing process and in effect, reduce the healing time. Research on the use of PRF in enhancing wound healing in maxillofacial and oral surgery have shown varying results. Therefore, this study was conceived to ascertain the effect PRF has on the post-operative sequelae of third molar teeth. Materials and Methods: This was a split mouth, prospective, single blinded, randomized control trial. The study sample was made up of 26 patients (N=26) who met the inclusion criteria. Four of the patients experienced neurosensory fallout of an associated nerve and were subsequently excluded from the sample. This resulted in the total sample size of twenty-two patients (n=22). Symmetrically impacted maxillary and mandibular third molars were removed under general anaesthesia. Patients were treated in a within subject design: when one side of a patient was treated with PRF, the other side was conventionally treated and acted as a control. The allocation of the side treated with PRF was 'random'. Patients were followed-up on Day 2 and Day 7, respectively. Pain scores were recorded on a visual analogue scale (VAS) using 0 to 10 pain score. Swelling, wound dehiscence, development of alveolar osteitis, wound infection and post-operative bleeding were compared between the intervention and control side. Results: Twenty-two patients (females = 13 and males = nine) b

No description available.

The development of the metaphor of personified wisdom in the Judaic wisdom corpora was observed to see how this “character” changed and how this metaphor was utilised in different texts for different contexts. In an attempt to see what the motivations were for the metamorphoses of the feminine metaphor in different Judaic wisdom texts, it was first necessary to identify these differences, and secondly, to study the socio-historical context(s) of each text. Wisdom texts that make use of the Lady metaphor reflect different emphases. Certain texts applied this metaphor through the trope of personification. The actions that appear in these personifications differ, which makes it quite clear that each author utilised this trope differently. The woman (wisdom or folly) was portrayed in contextual and culturally specific attributes and represented a certain contextual viewpoint, filled with contextual values, beliefs, and ideologies. The reason for the transformation of the lady metaphors in different Judaic wisdom corpora can be explained when each text is read against its context, the intended audience, and the probable ideological drive behind it. Certain texts were written in certain contexts, with specific purposes and were focused or intended for certain listeners and/or readers. The different portrayals of Woman Wisdom and/or Woman Folly in different texts depends largely on socio-historical and socio-cultural contextual factors, which informed but also demonstrated the authors’ viewpoints, values, beliefs and ideologies. / Thesis (PhD (Semitic Languages))--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Ancient Languages / PhD (Semitic Languages) / Restricted

Taking the title of this page literally, I wish to say the following: In this thesis I attempt to resolve some of the metaphilosophical problems concerning the logic of philosophy (i.e. its definition, structural principles, historiography, etc.) in view of the general theory that all of philosophy is but the expression of a single idea--that of the relationship between Reason and Experience. Towards this end, and from within a Kantian framework, I undertake to examine the history of philosophy in order to demonstrate how these basic metaphilosophical problems are generated and how it is that they cannot be solved. The one original claim being made in all of this, then, is simply that philosophy only ever has one thing to say and that this thing cannot be said. If I am right about this, then I have made no contribution to human knowledge, except in the Socratic sense that we now know something which cannot be known. I draw no moral from this except to note in passing that philosophy was first defined as the love of wisdom. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>It is fair to identify the motive of this dissertation with the paradoxical formulation of Gerhard von Rad, to the effect that the essence of biblical Wisdom is disclosed where the sages articulate this wisdom as inherently limited. This coincidence of opposites has been widely embraced by commentators and read as evidence for the sages' encounter with an infinite divine transcendence, to which they responded in humility, and by which their epistemological certitudes were rebuked. Proceeding from these assumptions, the interpretation of Proverbs has widely concerned itself with two nodal points: (1) the fear-of YHWH as the central concept in Proverbs' articulation wisdom as a finite human operation, conducted in the presence of an infinite divine; and (2) the figuration of this sublime experience in the iconic form of Woman-Wisdom. </p><p>The hypothesis of von Rad lends itself to another trajectory that prioritizes immanence over transcendence. On this reading, the limit of Wisdom lies not between its mere appearance for us (i.e. finite human subjects) and its essential being in itself (corresponding to a noumenal, divine beyond) but rather runs through the field of appearance, which cannot be rendered coherent by the sages' discursive intervention. This non-symbolizable yet immanent check on the sages' wisdom is analyzed in terms of Lacan's Real, a kernel of being (in psychoanalytic terms, jouissance) entirely beyond the signified that nevertheless arises out of the operations of signification. If discourse is thus intrinsically self-defeating, the status of transcendence should re-evaulated with respect to "limit." Transcendence is not the site that disturbs the Symbolic field, but rather the aporetic conditions of linguistic meaning rely on an externalizing process--what I have called a "poetics of making transcendent"-- for a given discourse to maintain its own coherence, i.e. as that which would be coherent if not for the contingent, impossible object. The fear-of YHWH and Woman-Wisdom, whose importance no one disputes, are re-read from this perspective: the former according to Lacan's concept of the Master-Signifier, the latter according to object (a), the object cause of desire.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis--Uppsala. / Includes indexes. Bibliography: p. 139-148.

<div>With countless problems facing the world, there is an indispensable need for individuals who are able to persist and succeed in generating virtuous actions to meet unsettling eventualities. There have even been successful attempts to deploy specific wisdom-based curricula and then measure the results. Since the possibility for developing wisdom in the classroom exists, teachers’ perceptions of wisdom and the implicit beliefs that influence their ability to cultivate wisdom in their classroom become important to understand. </div><div>The purpose of this study was to develop and validate the Perception of Wisdom Exploratory Rating (POWER) Scale based on the Polyhedron Model of Wisdom (PMW). According to PMW, components that characterize wisdom are knowledge; reflectivity and self-regulation; moral maturity; openness and tolerance; sound judgment; creativity; and dynamic balance and synthesis. A total number of 585 responses from in-service and preservice teachers with no missing data was collected. Inservice and preservice samples were randomly split into two halves for Exploratory Factor Analysis (n = 290) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (n = 295). In the EFA, the items fit a seven-factor structure, producing the following subscales: knowledge management; self-regulation; altruism and moral maturity; openness; tolerance; sound judgment and decision making; creative thinking. CFA was performed to test the construct validity of the scale. The model did produce a good fit to the data (χ2/df= 1.67, CFI= .92, TLI= .91, RMSEA= .049, and SRMR= .06). With continued testing and revisions, this instrument could be useful for cross-cultural comparison of perceptions of wisdom and identification of barriers to promoting wisdom instruction. It also could be used to identify and compare, across different populations, educators’ perceptions of wisdom and measuring perceptional changes due to designed interventions.</div><div><br></div>