Responsibilist Virtues and the ‘ Charmed Inner Circle ’ of Traditional Epistemology

Ernie Sosa’s unique brand of performance-based virtue epistemology continues to mature. His fourth book in epistemology in twice as many years, Judgment and Agency (2015) deepens and extends Sosa’s previous work on the nature and value of knowledge. The result is impressive. Judgment and Agency reads like a product of sustained, penetrating philosophical reflection by one of the great minds in the field—which, to my mind, is precisely what it is. My focus in this paper will be Sosa’s treatment (contained mainly in Chapter 2) of an issue specific to virtue epistemology: namely, the relationship between “responsibilist” and “reliabilist” approaches to virtue epistemology—or, somewhat less technically, the role of intellectual character virtues on Sosa’s reliabilist account of knowledge. However, readers with little or no interest in this or immediately related topics may still find the book a very interesting and worthwhile read. For, in addition to treating several core issues in traditional and virtue epistemology, Sosa also deals substantively with topics in several other areas, including (but not limited to) social epistemology, philosophical methodology, action theory, and philosophy of mind.