Phronesis and Nursing Clinical Judgment Revisited

Within nursing, clinical judgment is widely recognized as an essential professional competency underpinning clinical care, educational formation, and research development. Recent scholarship has renewed attention to clinical judgment. However, its conceptual structure remains undertheorized with respect to its normative and evaluative dimensions. This article argues that phronesis , understood as the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom, is constitutive of nursing clinical judgment. Drawing on philosophical and nursing virtue ethics perspectives, it examines Patricia Benner’s account of expert clinical judgment and argues that it is broadly aligned with Aristotelian phronesis .