The Seba library treats Phronesis in 6 passages, across 3 authors (including Arthur W.H. Adkins, Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Eric A. Havelock).
if phronesis is of no value, and hexeis are sufficient, it suffices that the correct result is produced by these guaranteed reactions, and intentions remain irrelevant.
Adkins argues that Aristotle insists on phronesis as the condition for moral responsibility, since its absence reduces ethical conduct to mere conditioned reaction and renders intentions philosophically void.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960thesis
the logos is common, the many live as though they possessed an individual method of thinking (phronesis). Heraclitus thinks that in logos, its form and function, the nature of the divine can be grasped.
Sullivan shows that Heraclitus deploys phronesis as a term for the merely private and therefore deficient mode of thinking, contrasted unfavorably with the shared divine logos that alone grasps universal truth.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
r) de rov <pQovfjaai navzog fidXXov detoregov nvog rvyxavei, cog eoixev, oficra, o r f)v fisv dvva/uv ovSejiote dnoXXvcnv
Havelock’s philological note cites the Platonic text to establish that the capacity for phronein — practical-intellectual apprehension — is of a more divine order than other faculties and is never wholly lost.
, Preface to Plato, 1963supporting
In B 104 he impatiently asks where ‘the noos or phren’ of most people can be when they trust what bards and the mob say.
Sullivan documents Heraclitus’s pairing of noos and phren as the psychic seats of genuine understanding, contextualizing phronesis within the broader early Greek vocabulary of intellectual self-governance.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
When a solution is not obvious or a decision impends, it is with phrenes that someone can consider possibilities of action.
Sullivan traces the deliberative function of phrenes in archaic poetry, providing the psychic-faculty background against which the philosophical concept of phronesis as practical deliberation later crystallizes.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting
Lycambes was ‘well-fitted’ with phrenes. The image here may suggest a physical aspect of phrenes. A person’s construction may be positive because it is built well with regard to phrenes.
Sullivan examines lyric and elegiac evidence associating phrenes with wise deliberation, illuminating the somatic-psychic continuum from which the abstract concept of phronesis eventually emerges.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995aside