Intellectual Virtues

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Abstract Some of the most interesting work in late-20th-century epistemology reintroduced, from ancient and medieval philosophy, the idea of an intellectual virtue and the related idea of proper epistemic function. But most of that work employed such concepts, with questionable success, in the interest of defining justification, warrant, or knowledge; and little or none of it offered detailed analyses of intellectual virtues. This book proposes and illustrates a different purpose for epistemology, one that we see in early modern thinkers, especially John Locke — namely that of guiding, refining, and informing the epistemic practices of the intellectual segment of the population. One important aspect of the project of such a ‘regulative epistemology’ is the intellectual character of the epistemic agent. For this purpose, fairly detailed sketches of particular intellectual virtues and of virtues' relations to epistemic goods, epistemic faculties, and epistemic practices, gain special importance. An underlying thesis is that a strict dichotomy between the intellectual virtues and the moral virtues is a mistake.