virtue epistemology: its nature, origin and approaches

A Virtue Epistemology

3. Animal knowledge is essentially apt belief, to be distinguished from the more demanding reflective knowledge. This is not to say that the word ‘knows’ is ambiguous. Maybe it is, but distinguishing a kind of knowledge as “animal” knowledge requires no commitment to that linguistic thesis. Indeed it requires no definition of the word ‘knows’ at all. One might take this to be primitive and stil...

Anti-luck Virtue Epistemology

It is argued that there are two ‘master’ intuitions about knowledgean anti-luck intuition and an ability intuitionand that these impose distinct epistemic demands. It is claimed that recognising this fact leads one towards a new proposal in the theory of knowledgeanti-luck virtue epistemologywhich can avoid the problems that afflict other theories of knowledge. This proposal is motivated in...

Bi-Level Virtue Epistemology

But beginning with his work in the late 1970s, Sosa takes a different approach to the debate between foundationalists and coherentists over the structure of knowledge. (Indeed, Sosa takes this different approach to a number of long-standing disputes in philosophy.) Rather than assuming the sides are talking past one another, Sosa suggests that each side has identi fi ed part of the truth, but m...

Sosa’s bi-level virtue epistemology

Ernest Sosa has long defended bi-level virtue epistemology on the grounds that it offers the best overall treatment of epistemology’s central issues. A surprising number of problems “yield to” the approach (Sosa 1991: 9). Sosa applies bi-level virtue epistemology to diagnose and bypass ongoing disputes in contemporary epistemology, including the disputes between foundationalists and coherentist...

In defence of virtue epistemology

In Defence of Virtue Epistemology Christoph Kelp Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy University of Leuven christoph.kelp [at] hiw.kuleuven.be Abstract. In a number of recent papers Duncan Pritchard argues that virtue epistemology's central ability condition—one knows that p if and only if one has attained cognitive success (true belief) because of the exercise of intellectual ability— is n...

Recent Work on Virtue Epistemology