Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology

This is an ambitious book, in two ways. First, it advocates a drastic transformation of contemporary epistemology’s scope and method. Second, it exemplifies a new way of doing epistemology, plumbing the depths of epistemic psychology by subtly characterizing the nature of, and interrelations among, a host of intellectual traits. Part I critiques standard “analytic” epistemology and expounds the authors’ alternative vision of epistemology’s scope and method. Part II consists of admirably nuanced and intriguing discussions of several intellectual virtues (and many corresponding vices), most notably: love of knowledge, firmness, courage, caution, humility, autonomy, generosity, and practical wisdom. Analytic epistemology, according to our authors, is generally in a sorry state. Too narrowly focused, equipped with a flawed methodology, and having grown increasingly “irrelevant to broader philosophical and human concerns” (6), it requires transformation to become “the serious and important discipline that it can and ought to be” (34). Analytic epistemologists restrict their focus to propositional knowledge. Our authors seem to agree, following Plantinga, that propositional knowledge is warranted true belief. But whereas war-