Keith Whitaker
Adjunct Asst. Professor, Center on Wealth and Philanthropy
Boston College, United States
Wisdom at Work: An Inquiry into Wealth Counseling as a Form of Practical Wisdom

Keith Whitaker serves as Director of Family Dynamics at Calibre, a division of Wachovia Wealth Management. He advises families on communication, governance, and legacy, using a comprehensive consultation process to foster family strengths. Dr. Whitaker helps families develop and reach shared goals in a variety of enterprises, including family business, wealth management, and philanthropy. Prior to joining Calibre, Dr. Whitaker was a philosophy professor at Boston College, focusing on political philosophy and ethics. For over a decade, he also served as trustee for a variety of personal and charitable trusts, facilitated family meetings, and served as president of a private foundation. Dr. Whitaker remains a Research Fellow at Boston College’s Center on Wealth and Philanthropy, and his work has appeared in Philanthropy Magazine, the Journal of Financial Planning, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he and Center Director Paul Schervish will be publishing a book on spirituality and philanthropy. Dr. Whitaker holds a PhD in Social Thought from the University of Chicago and a BA and MA in Classics and Philosophy from Boston University. He is a graduate of the National Trust School and is a Certified Trust and Financial Advisor (CTFA). He is also a member of the Institute of Certified Bankers.

Wisdom at Work: An Inquiry into Wealth Counseling as a Form of Practical Wisdom
This Project seeks wisdom in a new field known as “wealth counseling,” which involves consulting to individuals and families around their experience and use of material riches in their lives. Wealth counseling has grown up as a variant of the distinctly contemporary business of consulting. Though consulting does not tend to make claims about wisdom, if it were to do so, its wisdom would most closely resemble the kind known to earlier traditions as “practical wisdom” or phronesis, which involves deliberating well about the human good with a view towards action. This study hypothesizes that wealth counseling can act as an important form of practical wisdom. This Project will test its fundamental hypothesis in a number of ways: (1) by surveying wealth counseling’s activities and some of its outcomes as expressed in its own literature and self-descriptions; (2) through soliciting input from practitioners through a website that will also update the field on the Project’s work and help foster community within this new practice; and (3) by studying wealth counseling’s intellectual roots, in psychology and in moral philosophy.  It will result in the production of five essays: (1) “What is wealth counseling?”; (2) “What is its wisdom?”; (3) “What is the intellectual history of the wisdom of wealth?”; (4) “Does wealth counseling meet its own goals?”; (5) “Is it wisdom?”.  While focused on wealth counseling, this Project will benefit not only this field (and its many practitioners and clients) but also broadly diverse intellectual enterprises such as psychology, philosophy, and wisdom research. It will pursue novel insights in a novel field while connecting it with the traditional sources of wisdom. It will employ methods as old as textual analysis and as new as online social networking. It will respect the complexity of this interdisciplinary subject while producing specific outcomes of relevance to specialists and generalists. By doing so, it will produce results highly relevant to the understanding of wisdom in our contemporary world while also respecting and reflecting practical wisdom itself.

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