Plutarchian Praxis — The Art of Daily Decision
By Dimitrios Thomakos
We are pleased to announce the publication of Plutarchian Praxis: The Art of Daily Decision — Wisdom from Plutarch's Moralia. Drawing on the twenty-six ethical essays of Plutarch's Moralia — one of antiquity's most penetrating and least-read works of practical philosophy — the monograph constructs a rigorous, unified framework for daily decision-making grounded in ancient wisdom and formalized through modern decision theory. Across four Parts and eighteen chapters, it maps Plutarch's categories of character, habit, affective governance, friendship, and fortune onto a complete Waldian decision system: the parameter space of fortune and social environment, the character-filtered observation model, the Plutarchian loss function that weighs character integrity alongside external outcomes, and the decision rule understood as nothing less than the agent's cultivated character itself. The result is a framework in which every essay of the Moralia — from the governance of anger to the paradoxical information value of one's enemies — finds its precise place in a decomposition of decision risk.
The monograph's central formal contribution is the Plutarchian Minimax Theorem: the virtuous character configuration is not only morally admirable but strategically optimal — admissible, minimax-robust to adversarial fortune, and Bayes-optimal under the well-calibrated prior that honest self-examination produces. In the sequential dynamic programming formulation, the value function gap between virtuous and non-virtuous character grows with every remaining period of life, providing the rigorous foundation for Plutarch's insistence that education and character formation are investments of the first and last importance. The monograph closes with a formal definition of phronesis — practical wisdom — as the solution to the lifetime minimax decision problem, and with ten principles of Plutarchian Praxis for the daily practitioner. The full monograph is available for download below.
