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Foolishness and the Value of Knowledge

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Abstract

What is foolishness (sottise, Torheit, stultitia)? Foolishness and stupidity are by no means the same thing. Stupidity is opposed to intelligence. Someone who cannot calculate in his head, who stumbles in her native language, or cannot spot an opportunity, or….—the list is very long—is sometimes said to be stupid or, slightly less stupidly, to be more stupid than some mean. Perhaps intelligence is what intelligence tests measure. Perhaps it is the ability to grasp a variety of internal relations without experiments. Whatever stupidity is, it is no vice, unlike foolishness. In order to see what the vice consists in, let us consider some traditional examples of foolishness.

This paper is in part a translation of Mulligan (2009); cf. Mulligan (2014, 2016). I am grateful to Philipp Blum, Pascal Engel, Ingvar Johansson, Joachim Schulte and Denis Whitcombe for their suggestions, and to Riccardo Braglia, CEO, Elsin Health Care and the Fondazione Reginaldus (Lugano) for financial support of work on this translation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Kevin Mulligan

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  1. Kevin Mulligan
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Correspondence to Kevin Mulligan .

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  1. Union College Department of Philosophy, Schenectady, New York, USA

    Leo Zaibert

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Mulligan, K. (2016). Foolishness and the Value of Knowledge. In: Zaibert, L. (eds) The Theory and Practice of Ontology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55278-5_13

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