Sentience vs. Sapience

Main Difference

The main difference between Sentience and Sapience is that the Sentience is a capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively and Sapience is a deep understanding of or knowledge of a subject.

• Sentience

  Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive or experience subjectively. Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as “qualia”). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that require respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.

• Sapience

  Wisdom or sapience is the ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense, and insight. There appears to be consensus that wisdom is associated with attributes such as compassion, experiential self-knowledge, non-attachment and virtues such as ethics and benevolence.

  Wisdom has been defined in many different ways, a variety of measurement scales have been developed, and several subtypes of wisdom have been proposed. Out of these, phronesis and sophia are two key subtypes of wisdom. In the classical Greek tradition, there is a distinction between sophia “wisdom” and phronesis “prudence, practical intelligence”.