  Moreover, in discussing the non-coercive character of judgment, the fact that it can only appeal to but never force the agreement of others, she claims that “this ‘wooing’ or persuading corresponds closely to what the Greeks called peithein, the convincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically political form of people talking with one another” (BPF, 222). Some commentators have claimed that there is a contradiction in Arendt’s employment of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis alongside Kant’s idea of an “enlarged mentality,” since they supposedly pull in opposite directions, the former toward a concern with the particular, the latter toward universality and impartiality. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real, since Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is a theory of reflective judgment, that is, of those judgments where the universal is not given but must be searched out of the particular. In this respect the theory of aesthetic judgment to which Arendt appeals does have close affinities with Aristotle’s notion of phronesis: both are concerned with the judgment of particulars qua particulars, not with their subsumption under universal rules. If a distinction is to be made, it has more to do with the mode of asserting validity: In Aristotle phronesis is the privilege of a few experienced individuals (the phronimoi) who, over time, have shown themselves to be wise in practical matters; the only criterion of validity is their experience and their past record of judiciuos actions. In the case of judgments of taste, on the other hand, individuals have to appeal to the judgments and opinions of others, and thus the validity of their judgments rests on the consent they can elicit from a community of differently situated subjects.