Critical Systems Thinking

Hence people deny that Anaxagoras, Thales, and the wise of that sort are prudent … and they assert that such men know things that are extraordinary, wondrous, difficult, and daimonic – yet useless too, because they do not investigate the human goods. But prudence [phronesis] is concerned with the human things and with those about which it is possible to deliberate. For we assert this to be the work of the prudent person especially – deliberating well – and nobody deliberates about things that cannot be otherwise, or about so many things as are without some end, an end, moreover, that is a good attainable through action. He who is a good deliberator simply is skilled in aiming, in accord with calculation, at what is best for a human being in things attainable through action.

(Aristotle, c. 340 BCE, Nicomachean Ethics, book 6, translated by R.C. Bartlett and S.D. Collins, University of Chicago Press, 2011)