 Under the influence of Heidegger, Gadamer also took up, as a central element in his thinking, the idea of phronesis (‘practical wisdom’) that appears in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. For Heidegger the concept of phronesis is important, not only as a means of giving emphasis to our practical ‘being-in-the world’ over and against theoretical apprehension, but also as constituting a mode of insight into our own concrete situation (both our practical situation and, more fundamentally, our existential situation, hence phronesis constitutes a mode of self-knowledge). The way in which Gadamer conceives of understanding, and interpretation, is as just such a practically oriented mode of insight—a mode of insight that has its own rationality irreducible to any simple rule or set of rules, that cannot be directly taught, that necessarily implicates an understanding of self as well as other, and that is always oriented to the particular case at hand. The concept of phronesis can itself be seen as providing a certain elaboration of the dialogic conception of understanding Gadamer had already found in Plato, but it goes well beyond the Platonic account alone.