13 A reflexive practice of prudence Harry Gould From Aristotle onward, we have been taught to think of prudence as an attribute either of the character or of the mind, but consistently as a virtue of the intellect (aretai dianoetikai). 1 Although in all understandings it is con- cerned with deliberate human action and practice, the tradition has always insisted that it is not just a skill. It had (at least until Hobbes) been under- stood to be something of a higher order than a (mere) skill (Hobbes 1996 [1651], I.V.VII–IX, I.VIII.IV–V, IV.XL.VI.II). I find the proposition that prudence is a virtue that can be possessed to be unsatisfactory; I propose rather that prudence is more fruitfully conceptualized as a practice, a much broader notion. To be prudent, or to act prudently is best captured not in Aristotelian or Stoic psychology, but as a practice informed by Wittgenstein’ s notion of “knowing how to go on”. This points toward an understanding of prudence as a reflexive, rule-governed practice, as a “form of life” that involves thinking both about how we act and how we ought to act. As I will develop later, this is rather at odds with the predominant understanding of practice in the field, which by stripping deliberation from its understanding of practice, by making the relevant forms of knowledge wholly inarticulable and tacit, and by treating rules as enacted but never considered, strips all reflexivity from practice. To get at the traditional understandings of prudence from which I begin, it will be useful to start with the respective treatments of the composition of prudence of several of the authors/traditions that have provided our core vocabulary and semantics of prudence. Aristotle gave us a list of five compo- nent sub-virtues (to which he subsequently added two more), the Stoics six, Cicero three faculties, Aquinas eight, and Kant three (see Table 13.1) Surveying these sets of attributes points immediately to a conception of prudence as cognitive in character; in most of these treatments, the attributes identified are either mental operations or cognitive capacities . The very word “phronesis” derives from the verb “phroneo”, to think. To use Kantian language, the components of prudence in these renderings are faculties (Kant 1998 [1781/1787], A95–115; 2000 [1791], 20: 206–208, 20: 245–247; Rorty 1979). This is admittedly less clearly the case with Aquinas’ docility, caution, circumspection, and patience, however; they are difficult to