I'm not an Aristotle scholar, and in fact I'm too indolent to do any research on his thought, so I'll just state something about which I have wondered and I'll consider that my responsible blogosphere citizenship for the day. Aristotle famously characterized virtues as the golden mean between vices. The usual example seems to be: courage. It is a mean between impetuous action on the one hand, cowardice on the other. Temperance is likewise between anhedonia and hedonism --between the inability to experience pleasure and the inability to master one's pleasures. So far so good. Likewise, I remember hearing somewhere (and remember the indolence problem mentioned above) that justice for Aristotle is the mean between severity and leniency. I wonder though about wisdom, the virtue otherwise known to the ancients as prudence. Is that also a mean between two vices and, if so, what are the vices? My guess would be credulity on the one hand, and an excess of skepticism...
