Est autem et politica et prudencia, idem quidem habitus: appunti sul rapporto tra prudentia e politica in alcuni interpreti medievali del VI libro dell’Etica nicomachea (da Alberto Magno a Buridano)

Abstract

The overview hereafter presented offers the development of the scholastic interpretations of the passage from Book VI of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics where the Greek philosopher sets an "imperfect identity" between prudentia and politics. From this study two interesting conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, a linear development can not be easily traced: the medieval authors have given different interpretations of the Aristotelian passage, thus trying to solve the problematic relationship between the individual's moral life and his political one. The two possible solutions are equally represented: both the conception which favours the existence of one single virtue responsible for both ambits, and the one which instead holds that the differences between private morality and politics are so relevant that different virtues for each of these ambits are necessary. This first result clearly demonstrates the lack of a communis opinio. There is an evident tension between the two poles variously interpreted by the different authors, anyway in opposition to the thesis of the divisibility of prudentia in species. Thus the second conclusion: the authors taken into consideration do not seem eager to renounce to the idea of the unity of practical reason, and have rather searched with great force for other ways of conceiving this unity. In order to gain a complete image of the problem a wider research would be needed, thus connecting the a. m. reflections to some considerations on the nature of prudentia as a virtue, and on the existing relations between bonum commune and individual good. A general result is however achieved: the medieval thinkers would not even take into consideration an individual prudentia disconnected from politics, nor a political prudentia disconnected from moral life.