The Heart of Judgment: Practical Wisdom, Neuroscience, andNarrative. By Leslie Paul Thiele. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2006. 334p. $80.00.

Paul Thiele asks the right question: How should we think aboutpolitical judgment and, more generally, practical wisdom, understoodas an intellectual faculty or virtue that is different from, or atleast irreducible to, faculties of logical or scientific reasoningbut that remains, nonetheless, a decidedly rational mode of thoughtin its own right? Such a question defines, arguably, the project ofthe sixth book of the Nichomachean Ethics. AndAristotle's failure to provide there a fully satisfying account ofthe nature of phronesis—something different fromsophia on the one hand, from a merelynonrational knack on the other—establishes the problematic forvirtually all subsequent approaches to judgment.