Intellectual Virtue and Civil Discourse

The Cognitive Demands of Intellectual Virtue

My plan in this paper is to defend a 'cognitive requirement' on intellectual virtue. I shall argue that part of what is involved with possessing an intellectual virtue is having a certain cognitive perspective on or belief about the disposition in question. The argument will shed light on two main aspects of intellectual virtue. First, it will illuminate the positive psychological substance or ...

Perseverance as an Intellectual Virtue Nathan

Much recent work in epistemology has focused on the analysis of cognitive character traits. These traits comprise an important kind of intellectual virtue. 1 Among the intellectual virtues that have received extended treatment in the literature are responsibility, conscientiousness, honesty, courage, open-mindedness, firmness, humility, charity, and wisdom. 2 To my knowledge, no philosopher has...

Speaking Power to Truth: Digital Discourse and the Public Intellectual

Talking Virtue: professionalism and virtue ethics

The twentieth century phenomenon of professionalism had a major impact on the economy of nation states and has been recognised as a key element of post-industrial societies. As an anointed class, professionals reserved the right to prescribe their own roles and responsibilities. Critics of professional interests, however, have described professionals’ own definition of their roles and responsib...

A virtue epistemology of the Internet: Search engines, intellectual virtues, and education

This paper applies a virtue epistemology approach to using the Internet, as to improve our information-seeking behaviours. Virtue epistemology focusses on the cognitive character of agents and is less concerned with the nature of truth and epistemic justification as compared to traditional analytic epistemology. Due to this focus on cognitive character and agency, it is a fruitful but underexpl...