Virtue Epistemology

This inaugural lecture outlines the contours of a history of critical thinking. Drawing on case studies from the 19th, 20th, and 21st-century humanities, it draws attention to demands that critical thinking makes on the self – that is, to skills, virtues, attitudes, and capacities characteristic of what one might call a “critical self.” On the one hand, the cultivation of such qualities in research and teaching alike is a theme that allows for cross-disciplinary comparisons of the kind that historians of the humanities like to make. On the other, it touches directly on questions of contemporary relevance. What does it mean to foster critical thinking skills in contemporary academia? Is critical thinking compatible with care and compassion, or does it cultivate a stance of detachment, perhaps even of suspicion? Is critical thinking a much-needed remedy against fake news, or are societies struggling with political polarization and diminishing trust in public institutions likely to benefit more from a “postcritical turn”?

This paper analyses the phenomenon of epistemic injustice within contemporary healthcare. We begin by detailing the persistent complaints patients make about their testimonial frustration and hermeneutical marginalization, and the negative impact this has on their care. We offer an epistemic analysis of this problem using Miranda Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice. We detail two types of epistemic injustice, testimonial and hermeneutical, and identify the negative stereotypes and structural features of modern healthcare practices that generate them. We claim that these stereotypes and structural features render ill persons especially vulnerable to these two types of epistemic injustice. We end by proposing five avenues for further work on epistemic injustice in healthcare.

Forthcoming in David Coady and Miranda Fricker (eds.), Applied Epistemology, a special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy

This article provides a critical analysis of the situationist challenge against Aristotelian moral psychology. It first outlines the details and results from 4 paradigmatic studies in psychology that situationists have heavily drawn upon in their critique of the Aristotelian conception of virtuous characteristics, including studies conducted by Hartshorne and May (1928), Darley and Batson (1973), Isen and Levin (1972), and Milgram (1963). It then presents 10 problems with the way situationists have used these studies to challenge Aristotelian moral psychology. After challenging the situationists on these grounds, the article then proceeds to challenge the situationist presentation of the Aristotelian conception, showing that situationists have provided an oversimplified caricature of it that goes against the grain of much Aristotelian text. In evaluating the situationist challenge against the actual results from empirical research as well as primary Aristotelian text, it will be shown that the situationist debate has advanced both an extreme, untenable view about the nature of characteristics and situations, as well as an inaccurate presentation of the Aristotelian view.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-013-9249-8
https://doctorcroom.com/croom-2014a

This paper explores virtue-theoretic responses to the problem posed by epistemic luck. In particular, it examines an influential contemporary form of virtue epistemology⎯known as robust virtue epistemology⎯which aims to deal with this problem by offering an account of knowledge exclusively in terms of a virtue-theoretic epistemic condition. Some of the main difficulties facing this account are surveyed, along with the main lines of response.

This article argues that, given the current pervasive uncertainty about the reliability of jury deliberation, we ought to treat it with epistemic humility. I further argue that epistemic humility should be expressed and enforced by turning jury deliberation from a mandatory rule of the jury trial to a waivable right of the defendant. I consider two main objections to my argument: the first one concerns the putative self-defeatingness of humility attitudes; the second objection points to the burdensomeness of granting an unconditional jury deliberation waiver to the defendant.

It is argued that the situationist challenge to virtue epistemology fails to establish what it claims to establish, at least so long as the latter proposal is understood correctly. We begin by making the case for such a challenge, which we grant is prima facie strong, at least insofar as one’s focus is the kind of rationally grounded knowledge typically possessed by mature humans. It is argued, however, that the extent of situational influence on cognitive performance that epistemic situationists can credibly lay claim to is in fact consistent with the most plausible rendering of virtue epistemology. This is a modest virtue epistemology which is motivated, in contrast to a robust virtue epistemology, by appeal to the phenomenon of epistemic dependence. It is argued that once one appreciates the epistemic dependence of knowledge, then one realises that there is no essential tension between bona fide rationally grounded knowledge, by virtue-theoretic lights, and the influence of situational factors on the acquisition of such knowledge. It is granted, however, that epistemic situationism demonstrates that much of our rationally grounded knowledge involves less by way of cognitive achievement than we often suppose, and hence that the epistemic situationist can lay claim to a mitigated version of their main thesis. Furthermore, it is explained that this has ramifications for the extent of understanding-why a subject possesses. We conclude by putting these points to work in the epistemology of education, where we demonstrate that situational factors can in fact be exploited in order to develop, in pedagogical settings, cognitive ability and thereby enable students to exhibit higher levels of cognitive achievement.

YouTube has been implicated in the transformation of users into extremists and conspiracy theorists. The alleged mechanism for this radicalizing process is YouTube's recommender system, which is optimized to amplify and promote clips that users are likely to watch through to the end. YouTube optimizes for watch-through for economic reasons: people who watch a video through to the end are likely to then watch the next recommended video as well, which means that more advertisements can be served to them. This is a seemingly innocuous design choice, but it has a troubling side-effect. Critics of YouTube have alleged that the recommender system tends to recommend extremist content and conspiracy theories, as such videos are especially likely to capture and keep users' attention. To date, the problem of radicalization via the YouTube recommender system has been a matter of speculation. The current study represents the first systematic, pre-registered attempt to establish whether and to what extent the recommender system tends to promote such content. We begin by contextualizing our study in the framework of technological seduction. Next, we explain our methodology. After that, we present our results, which are consistent with the radicalization hypothesis. Finally, we discuss our findings, as well as directions for future research and recommendations for users, industry, and policy-makers.

Discussing the notion of " epistemic emotions " as proposed by Morton (2010), and his argument for which intellectual virtues will be " hard to attain " without those emotions, I introduce the thesis for which epistemic emotions constitute one of the building blocks of intellectual virtues, in order to provide an explanation of the cognitive process that binds the two. Epistemic emotions are building blocks, as: (1) motivational component, and (2) transformative component, and they assay their causal role as necessary components (but not sufficient) of intellectual virtues. Framing the argument within virtue responsibilism, I explain the machinery that leads from epistemic emotions to intellectual virtues, and then from those to affective abilities, stressing the role of training in the process of transformation of the agent in the epistemic journey. Affective abilities, as the refined epistemic emotions that are ready to use within the practice of intellectual virtues, are the secure and beneficial dispositions that enhance the responsible practice of cognition.

What should a virtue theory of argumentation say about fallacious reasoning? If good arguments are virtuous, then fallacies are vicious. Yet fallacies cannot just be identified with vices, since vices are dispositional properties of agents whereas fallacies are types of argument. Rather, if the normativity of good argumentation is explicable in terms of virtues, we should expect the wrongness of bad argumentation to be explicable in terms of vices. This approach is defended through analysis of several fallacies, with particular emphasis on the ad misericordiam.

Education is a process of drawing out human potentialities. Man is capable of developing himself to the fullest and it is in the realization of moral excellence that human fulfillment is attained. When we look deep into the process of man’s becoming morally good or bad, we see education at the helm of the person’s realization of moral excellence and human fulfillment.  The dynamism of education and determining a person’s moral development are all interconnected.  The educational praxis may be shaped and determined by social forces or realities outside the person but must ultimately be based on a profound understanding of the object of its formation: the person. This paper explores the thoughts of Edith Stein confronting the educational problems of her times. Her thoughts on education are perennially useful for examining educational issues already raised in her era, but are resonating anew today albeit in different forms. In this essay,  I examine Stein’s views on how education in being aimed at attaining human fulfillment,  strives ultimately after moral excellence as the highest value that  man can aspire for.

It is argued that trust is a performative kind and that the evaluative normativity of trust is a special case of the evaluative normativity of performances generally. The view is shown to have advantages over competitor views, e.g., according to which good trusting is principally a matter of good believing (e.g.. Moreover, the view can be easily extended to explain good (and bad) distrust , where the latter is understood as aimed (narrow-scoped) forbear-ance from trusting. The overarching framework-which assimilates the evaluative norms of trusting (and distrusting) to performance-theoretic norms-supplies us with an entirely new lens to view traditional philosophical problems about what is involved in trusting and distrusting well and badly, and thus, places our capacity to make progress on problems in this area on a new footing

The author argues for the following as constituents of the moral virtue of open-mindedness: (i) a second-order awareness that is not reducible to first-order doubt; (ii) strong moral concern for members of the moral community; and (iii) some freedom from reactive habit patterns, particularly with regard to one's self-narratives, or equanimity. Drawing on Buddhist philosophical accounts of equanimity, the author focuses on the third constituent, equanimity, and argues that it is a central, but often ignored, component of the moral virtue of open-mindedness, and its absence can explain many failures of open-mindedness.

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the Cartesian proof of the external world sheds light on some vexatious questions concerning his theory of sense perception. Three main points emerge from the discussion: a picture of the mind, conceived as the power of understanding, as essentially related to the physical world; an extension of rationality such that it includes a set of necessities that neither can be deduced from the principles furnished by pure understanding alone nor are to be found among the particular items of sense experience; and a conception of human sense perception as a composite power that includes sensory awareness as well as understanding, and so that establishes a sharp distinction between human and animal sensory awareness. As far as agency is a constitutive ingredient of human sense perception, Descartes’ doctrine is in line with some current versions of a virtue epistemology.

“Uma crença comum a todos os autores deste livro é a de que, em Filosofi a, ainda há o que ser dito. Mesmo que porventura não existam novas verdades a serem descobertas, ainda há, pelo menos, velhas verdades que precisam ser ditas novamente numa linguagem atual. Em fi losofi a, o importante não é dizer algo novo, pois a originalidade não é um valor fundamental, mas sim dizer algo correto. Cada um dos textos que compõem este livro pretende dar uma resposta correta à pergunta formulada. Nisso, esses textos diferem de muitos outros textos fi losófi cos que se propõem a somente interpretar o que outro fi lósofo entendeu como uma resposta correta, sem julgar por si mesmo se a resposta é, de fato, correta. Assim, ao propor uma resposta como correta, cada artigo convida o leitor a julgar por si mesmo se o que se propõe é correto. O que está em jogo não é tanto se alguém pensou assim ou assado sobre uma determinada questão, mas se tal ou tal resposta é a resposta correta para essa questão.”

Some philosophers, such as Alex Rosenberg, claim that the natural sciences deliver epistemic values such as knowledge and understanding, whereas, say, literature and literary studies, merely have aesthetic value. Many of those working in the field of literary studies oppose this idea. But it is not clear exactly how works of literary art embody knowledge and understanding and how literary studies can bring these to the light. After all, literary works of art are pieces of fiction, which suggests that they are not meant to represent the actual world. How then can they deliver knowledge and understanding? I argue that literature and literary studies confer knowledge and understanding in a variety of ways: they give us insight into the work and the world of the work of art in question, they shape our intellectual virtues, they invite us to apply various moral, epistemic, and prudential hypotheses, they deliver moral propositional knowledge, and they increase our understanding or bring about full understanding with respect to meaning, virtue, and significance. In the course of my argument, I refer at several junctures to Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Edith Wharton’s Summer, in order to illustrate each of these claims.

A good question for ‘integrated history and philosophy of science’ is that of what other philosophical disciplines and intellectual traditions we ought to integrate with.  Few historians and philosophers pursued this question more vigorously than Paul Feyerabend, even if his own efforts lapsed, at times, into excess.  In this talk, I engage with the ‘limits of integration’ theme by asking why Feyerabend ‘defended’ astrology – and what, if anything, contemporary practitioners of ‘integrated history and philosophy of science’ might learn from it.  Two common explanations of the purpose of those defences are rejected as lacking textual support.  A third ‘pluralist’ reading is judged more persuasive, but found to be incomplete, owing to a failure to accommodate Feyerabend’s focus upon the integrity and characters of scientists.  I therefore suggest that the defences are more fully understood as defences of the epistemic integrity of scientists that take the form of critical exposures of failures by scientists to act with integrity.  An appeal is made to contemporary virtue epistemology that clarifies Feyerabend’s implicit association of epistemic integrity and epistemic virtue.  If so, what he was defending was science, not astrology.  I end with two claims. The first is that, read in this way, Feyerabend is more conservative and less radical than people often suppose.  The second is that it would be very useful to further integrate history and philosophy of science with virtue epistemology – as Feyerabend, forty years ago, tried to do.  Doing so would helpfully line up a range of issues of interest to integrated HPS – scientific practice, pluralism, epistemic virtues – and open up new ways of understanding science.

As an applied branch of virtue epistemology, the field of intellectual character education has offered practical guidance for educators who are interested in facilitating intellectual virtues in their classrooms. This chapter explores that practical guidance—i.e., the ‘standard approach’ to facilitating intellectual virtues in classrooms. Section 1 explains the key features of the standard approach. Section 2 uses insights from vice epistemology to draw two lessons for the standard approach. First, since some students are already on their way to developing intellectual vices, they aren’t likely to be helped by the standard approach. Second, tendencies toward intellectual vices may be prevalent among our students and caused by systemic factors. Accordingly, any progress made in the classroom is likely to be ephemeral, if systemic changes aren’t made.

What makes an intellectual virtue a virtue?  A straightforward and influential answer to this question has been given by virtue-reliabilists: a trait is a virtue only insofar as it is truth-conducive.

In this paper I shall contend that recent arguments advanced by Jack Kwong in defence of the reliabilist view are good as far as they go, in that they advance the debate by usefully clarifying ways in how best to understand the nature of open-mindedness.  But I shall argue that these considerations do not establish the desired conclusions that open-mindedness is truth-conducive.

To establish these much stronger conclusions we would need an adequate reply to what I shall call Montmarquet’s objection.  I argue that Linda Zagzebski’s reply to Montmarquet’s objection, to which Kwong defers, is inadequate.  I conclude that it is contingent if open-mindedness is truth-conducive, and if a necessary tie to truth is what makes an intellectual virtue a virtue, then the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is jeopardised.  We either need an adequate reliabilist response to Montmarquet’s objection, or else seek alternative accounts of what it is that makes a virtue a virtue.  I conclude by briefly outlining some alternatives.

While the teaching of intellectual virtue is receiving growing attention, little research exists on how to assess the development of intellectual virtue in students. This is not without reason. Some may think that the development of intellectual virtue should not (or perhaps cannot) be assessed. Furthermore, standard forms of assessment – especially as we encounter them in the high stakes graded exams common in schools and universities – seem to encourage an instrumental rather than a virtuous orientation towards the value of knowledge. In this paper, I review the challenges that exist for teachers in assessing intellectual virtue. I review attempts that have been made to assess something like intellectual virtue in (1) research on moral development, (2) research on ‘personal epistemology’ and (3) research into critical thinking. I conclude that while it is possible to assess the development of intellectual virtue with enough precision to demonstrate the effectiveness of teaching for intellectual character, this does not imply that virtue must be graded.

内容提要：本文综合评述当代认识论的现状以及主干近10 年来主要发展趋势和最新理论贡献。 它首先介绍一些必要的理论背景：盖梯尔难题，闭合原则，内在论与外在论之争 (第 2节)，然后分 6 节集中讨论、评述：(i) 温和基础主义的兴起及发展 (第 3 节) ； (ii) 对认知怀疑论的最新表述及回应 (第 4 节) ； (iii) 认知无限辨明论 (第 5 节) ；(iv) 认知语境主义的兴起，其理论贡献，以及存在的问题；(v) 德性认识论的二个模型，它们的优点,和现有的问题。最后简单讨论当代认识论面临的危机与机遇。


Abstract: This article surveys the current state of affairs and some important new developments of epistemology in the past 10 years. It first introduces some necessary theoretical background (the Gettier problem, the closure principle, and internalism vs. externalism), and then focuses on (i) the rise and development of modest forms of foundationalism, (ii) recent debates on epistemic skepticism, (iii) epistemic infinitism, (iv) epistemic contextualism and its contributions and problems, (v)  two models of virtue epistemology, its merits and existing issues. It ends with a brief review of the theoretical crisis faced with contemporary epistemology and its opportunities.

How does the idea that knowledge is power play out in our schools and universities. How does it feature in our education systems and how does it impact upon the intellectual characters of students. Specifically, how does the pervasiveness of this idea in our schools and classrooms affect students’ willingness and ability to be intellectually humble. In this paper, I suggest that this idea presents itself in contemporary classrooms as a barrier to the development and exercise of intellectual humility. Simply put, when we equate knowledge with power, we make it harder to be intellectually humble. In its most prevalent manifestation, this barrier arises in the form of answer-oriented education. I spend the majority of the paper outlining the nature and impact of answer-oriented education and, towards the end, suggest one way to remove this barrier by shifting from answer-oriented to question-oriented education. The latter, I argue, warrants further attention in philosophical and educational research.

I propose the "Moral Wager": If the evidence will never justify believing or denying a proposition, the agent should believe when believing has a higher expected moral value. Believing has a higher expected moral value by better promoting the agent's intellectual virtues, morally good actions, and/or the morally better state of affairs described by the proposition.

Democracies, Dewey and others have argued, are ideally spaces of reasons—they allow for an exchange of reasons both practical and epistemic by those willing to engage in that discourse.  That requires that citizens have convictions they believe in, but it also requires that they be willing to listen to each other. This paper examines how a particular psychological attitude, “epistemic arrogance”, can undermine the achievement of these goals. The paper presents an analysis of this attitude and then examines four arguments for how its adoption—especially by the powerful—undermines the ideal of democracy as a space of reasons.

My aim, in this chapter, is to present a characterisation of the intellectual virtue of curiosity that offers some insight into educating for the virtue, and provides theoretically grounded motivations for doing so. I begin by outlining a characterisation of curiosity as an intellectual virtue. I then examine three key features of this characterisation relevant to the task of educating for curiosity as an intellectual virtue. Finally, I present, what I take to be two of the most compelling reasons to educate for the intellectual virtue of curiosity.

There has been increased interest in character strengths or virtues in recent years in social research and in various policy domains. However, while the notion of virtue has gained credibility in the fields of positive psychology and moral philosophy, it has yet to be satisfactorily considered from the perspective of social theory – in spite of the ongoing calls of researchers who have identified the need for further investigation into the role of culture and social context in the development of individuals' characters. In order to consider how good character and excellence in specific virtues are formed and sustained in social context, this article gives a theoretical account of character and virtue using well-known microsociological concepts. It is argued that whereas virtues are often understood as psychological 'traits' or 'dispositions', they are also socially practiced and represented. Analyses of their related social processes are therefore appropriate and empirically promising, particularly in institutional settings, and can complement other theoretical and methodological approaches.

This paper offers an in-depth examination of the intellectual virtue of inquisitiveness. A characterisation of inquisitiveness is developed in Part I in which the inquisitive person is identified as one who is characteristically motivated to engage sincerely in good questioning. Part II then examines the place of inquisitiveness among the virtues. Inquisitiveness is seen to bear a defining relationship to the process of inquiry as a fundamentally motivating intellectual virtue. On this basis it is argued that inquisitiveness plays a distinctively valuable role in the intellectually virtuous life placing it at the heart of autonomous virtue epistemology.

Michael Brady's Suffering and Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a wonderfully rich, important, and meaningful book. Brady's detailed case study of suffering provides a specific and much-needed illustration of the significance of feelings and emotions for virtue and moral and intellectual life more generally. This paper evaluates Brady’s arguments, focusing on: (1) the desire account of suffering (Chapters 1 and 2); (2) the role of suffering in virtue-development (Chapter 4); (3) whether suffering is required for evaluative knowledge (Chapter 5); (4) heroism and selflessness (Chapter 6), and (5) the need to reduce suffering (Chapter 5).

Can we be intellectually humble about our own convictions? Should we be? These are the two questions I want to examine in this chapter. These questions, while overtly philosophical, have a personal and a political relevance in our lives. Most people have, at one point or another, felt the anxiety-producing tension between recognizing that their convictions may be improvable on the one hand, and wishing to hold fast to their principles on the other. This tension can arise whenever we find our convictions challenged or even queried. Most of us desire to not appear dogmatic, but we also find it uncomfortable to question those ideas we hold most dear. Doing so seems to raise the prospect that we might not be as committed as we wish to be. Politically speaking, this tension manifests itself as a familiar conflict between two democratic ideals. One ideal is that of the committed, engaged public-citizens with convictions who are willing to lobby and vote for them. Democracies strive for this ideal because an apathetic electorate is an obviously ineffective electorate. Yet it is also an ideal that citizens should listen to, and deliberate about, each other's convictions. But that can be politically difficult, as any politician can tell you. It is often politically unwise to appear willing to listen to the other side. Most people, and most democracies, tend to operate on the assumption that the tensions just sketched can be relieved, or at least lived with. I agree, or at least hope, that this is true. But in order to relieve this tension we must first understand its elements. To this task I now turn. 12.2 Conviction What is a conviction? It is not just a strongly held belief. I strongly believe I am writing on a computer at the moment but that isn't a conviction of mine. I suggest instead that convictions are identity-reflecting commitments. 1 Let's expand on these points. As Wittgenstein famously opined, sometimes reasons just run out, and "our spade is turned" on bedrock. That is how we often think of our deepest convictions as the ground on which our worldview stands. They become part of the landscape, our frame of reference, our "picture of the world" that is the very "background against which [we] distinguish between what is true and what is false" (Wittgenstein, 1969, §94). As a result, convic

"This article argues that in a complex socio-political world, social work ethics needs to re-cast the moral identity of the social worker in terms of virtue ethics. We review virtue theory’s Aristotelian foundations and criticisms of Kantian and utilitarian theory and show how they apply to social work. Subsequently we offer an account of a virtue based social work that questions the validity of several models of practice currently fashionable. Virtue theory emphasizes the priority of the individual moral agent who has acquired virtues commensurate with the pursuit of a revisable conception of the good life—the well-being of all in a defined community. The virtues are the acquired inner qualities of humans—character—the possession of which, if applied in due measure, will typically contribute to the realization of the good life or ‘eudaimonia’. The role of the virtuous social worker is shown to be one that necessitates appropriate application of intellectual and practical virtues such as justice, reflection, perception,judgement, bravery, prudence, liberality and temperance.

This self-flourishing worker in bringing together the capacity for theoretical and practical action makes possible a hermeneutic or interpretive praxis best appraised in dialogue with fellow-practitioners and clients. With a social work remit increasingly routinized by accountability, quality control and risk management there is an emphasis on regulation and duties. This has produced a culture of following approved or typical processes resulting in defensive forms of social work wholly uncongenial to the development of human qualities likely
to promote social workers’ engagement in critique and revision of what counts as best practice. In sum, our core proposition is that social work practice and education, to fit an unpredictable, non-linear world, should develop means by which professionals nurture the virtues. This would reflexively enhance social work itself."

I think  that  it  is  symbolic  to  begin  this  review  of  Robert  Sokolowski‘s Phenomenology  of  the  Human  Person  with  a  quote  of  his  declarative  I, expressed  and  asserted  as  wish,  that  he  deploys  to  begin  the  book.  As we  will  learn,  the  declarative  use  of  I  manifests  both  its  speaker  and  the thing  that  it  speaks  of.  Hence,  we  can  read  it  as  Sokolowski  wishing  to  be spoken  or  thought  of  as  an  agent  of  truth.  And  his  book  is  an  act  that realizes  his  wish. 2Indeed  the  human  person  as  the  agent  of  truth  is  what the  book  speaks  of,  what  it  shows,  and  what  finally  manifests.  But  here  I  will  arrest  the  flow  of  our  thoughts  as  I  wish  to  immediately  juxtapose  and entangle  the  agent  of  truth  with  its  potential,  its  good,  and  its  best.  This  is because  the  book  as  the  culmination  of  Sokolowski‘s  wish,  intended  and then  acted,  is  a  philosophical  text  and  it  shows  precisely  what  the  human person  as  agent  of  truth  can  be.  To  speak  and  write  about  the  human person as  an agent  of  truth  is  to  speak  and  write  philosophically:

Whereas epistemology is (broadly speaking) the philosophical theory of knowledge, its nature and scope, metaepistemology takes a step back from particular substantive debates in epistemology in order to inquire into the assumptions and commitments made by those who engage in these debates. This entry will focus on a selection of these assumptions and commitments, including (§1) whether (or not) there are objective epistemic facts; and how to characterize (§2) the subject matter and (§3) the methodology of epistemology.

Virtue epistemologists of the responsibilist persuasion have rejected the classical Aristotelian and Thomistic distinction between the intellectual and moral virtues. They prefer to think of the intellectual virtues as a subset of the moral virtues. Thomas Aquinas defends the distinction and its importance. By Aquinas’ lights, Linda Zagzebski, one of the most prominent responsibilists, not only denies the distinction between moral and intellectual virtues but collapses the one into the other. Aquinas would likely regard all of the virtues that Zagzebski describes as intellectual virtues. I argue that the Thomistic distinction between the intellectual and moral virtues remains significant. In this paper, I compare Zagzebski’s and Aquinas’ accounts of virtue and show why these differences matter, particularly for a consideration of the virtues of modern science.

An oft-repeated dictum in contemporary epistemology is that the epistemic goal minimally includes the acquisition of true beliefs and the avoidance of false beliefs. There is, however, a robust epistemological tradition in the Christian West that distinguishes between
a virtuous and a vicious desire for and pursuit of cognitive contact with reality. The cognitive ideal for humans consists (in part) in epistemic temperance, an appetite for and pursuit of truth that is conducted in proper measure, and calibrated to appropriate objects and ends. Here I explore this rich Christian tradition with an eye toward its application to contemporary Christian philosophy.

Epistemologists have long worried that the willingness of open-minded people to reconsider their beliefs in light of new evidence is both a condition of improving their beliefs and a risk factor for losing their grip on what they already know. In this paper I introduce and attempt to resolve a moral variation of this puzzle: A willingness to engage people having strange or (to us) repugnant moral ideals looks like a condition of broadening our moral horizons, but also a risk factor for doing the wrong thing or becoming bad. I pursue a contractualist line according to which such hazardous engagement is a virtue only when it matters to our interlocutors whether they can justify themselves to us on terms we can accept—and for our sake or for the sake of their own virtue, not instrumentally or to get something out of us. When it does not so matter, openness can be unintelligent or gullible, i.e. not virtuous.

Forthcoming in Alessandra Tanesini and Michael P. Lynch (eds.) Polarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives (Routledge) Let's begin with a quote from the President of the United States: "CNN's Don Lemon, the dumbest man on television, insinuated last night while asking a debate "question" that I was a racist, when in fact I am "the least racist person in the world."" This appeared on Donald Trump's twitter account on July 31, 2019, the morning after a televised debate in which Don Lemon, one of the few black anchors on CNN, asked the Democratic presidential candidates to address Trump's bigotry and growing racial divisions in the U.S. My project here is not to diagnose Trump, nor is it to argue that he is a racist, though I think both of those projects are worthwhile. On this occasion, my goal is to explore the relationship between closed-mindedness and arrogance. The quote above simultaneously exhibits both. Trump closed-mindedly dismisses Lemon as a source of relevant questions and views, and arrogantly claims to be the least racist person in the world. Here, and elsewhere, closed-mindedness and arrogance go hand-in-hand. Indeed, they are so often conjoined that we expect to find them together. Does this mean that closed-mindedness and arrogance are the same thing? Or, are they different things that are usually found together but sometimes come apart? If they come apart, what does that look like? My task is to try to answer this set of questions, and shed some light on the relationship between closed-mindedness and arrogance. I intend this project to be a contribution to the developing field of 'vice epistemology,' which focuses on dispositions, attitudes, and character traits that make us bad thinkers. The industry-term for these qualities is intellectual vices. The foundational goals of vice epistemology include determining which qualities are intellectual vices, and providing analyses of those qualities. Here, I propose analyses of closed-mindedness and arrogance that allow us to distinguish between them, while also explaining why they are so often found together. If this is on the right track, closed-mindedness and arrogance are correlated, but they are not the same. By way of preview, section I identifies closed-mindedness with being unwilling to engage seriously with intellectual options or unwilling to revise one's beliefs. Section II identifies arrogance with under-owning one's cognitive shortcomings and over-owning one's cognitive strengths. These analyses of closed-mindedness and arrogance allow for cases where they come apart. Section III focuses on a subset of such cases in which agents are closed-minded but not arrogant. Real world illustrations include academics, who engage with flat-earthers, and activists, who engage with white supremacists, while being unwilling to revise their own beliefs that the earth is round and that people are people. The final section explains why we should nevertheless expect closed-mindedness and arrogance to be found together. I. Closed-mindedness What is it to be closed-minded? Below, I propose an analysis of the trait of closed-mindedness. I don't assume that the trait of closed-mindedness is always vicious. Rather, I treat the analysis of the trait, and its status as an intellectual vice, as separate questions. Though closed-mindedness is usually vicious, I will be suggesting that is isn't always vicious, and might even be virtuous. Let's begin with a paradigm case of a closed-minded speech act.

Analytic theology has, since its inception, been a metaphysics-heavy enterprise. Indeed, a brief perusal of the contents of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (i.e. a predecessor to the present volume under review) reveals as much. My noting this emphasis on metaphysics is not a criticism, for the fruits of Christian analytic metaphysics have been widespread indeed. Nevertheless, developments in epistemology have been at least as significant in many respects as those in metaphysics, and thus, the comparative rarity with which they emerge in discussion in contemporary theology is unfortunate. Such a lament, however, has in recent times become less apt, for with the release of The Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology, we now have a text which ably introduces its audience of theologians, scriptural scholars, and philosophers to a broad class of epistemological concerns for theology. No one writing in analytic theology should remain wholly ignorant of its contents, which hail from many of the best epistemological and theological minds today.