This book explores how physicists, astronomers, chemists, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed ‘epistemic virtues’ such as accuracy, objectivity, and intellectual courage. In doing so, it takes the first step in providing an integrated history of the sciences and humanities. It assists in addressing such questions as: What kind of perspective would enable us to compare organic chemists in their labs with paleographers in the Vatican Archives, or anthropologists on a field trip with mathematicians poring over their formulas? While the concept of epistemic virtues has previously been discussed, primarily in the contexts of the history and philosophy of science, this volume is the first to enlist the concept in bridging the gap between the histories of the sciences and the humanities. Chapters research whether epistemic virtues can serve as a tool to transcend the institutional disciplinary boundaries and thus help to attain a ‘post-disciplinary’ historiography of modern knowledge. Readers will gain a contextualization of epistemic virtues in time and space as the book shows that scholars themselves often spoke in terms of virtue and vice about their tasks and accomplishments. This collection of essays opens up new perspectives on questions, discourses, and practices shared across the disciplines, even at a time when the neo-Kantian distinction between sciences and humanities enjoyed its greatest authority. Scholars including historians of science and of the humanities, intellectual historians, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of science will all find this book of particular interest and value.

This book presents four bridges connecting work in virtue epistemology and work in philosophy of science (broadly construed) that may serve as catalysts for the further development of naturalized virtue epistemology. These bridges are: empirically informed theories of epistemic virtue; virtue theoretic solutions to under determination; epistemic virtues in the history of science; and the value of understanding. Virtue epistemology has opened many new areas of inquiry in contemporary epistemology including: epistemic agency, the role of motivations and emotions in epistemology, the nature of abilities, skills and competences, wisdom and curiosity. Value driven epistemic inquiry has become quite complex and there is a need for a responsible and rigorous process of constructing naturalized theories of epistemic virtue. This volume makes the involvement of the sciences more explicit and looks at the empirical aspect of virtue epistemology. Concerns about virtue epistemology are considered in the essays contained here, including the question: can any virtue epistemology meet both the normativity constraint and the empirical constraint? The volume suggests that these worries should not be seen as impediments but rather as useful constraints and desiderata to guide the construction of naturalized theories of epistemic virtue.

This book is a collection of articles about epistemology. They include overviews of the field, investigations of the nature of knowledge, reflections on the value of knowledge, examinations of credit and luck, and explorations of future directions for research.

This volume brings together recent work by leading and up-and-coming philosophers on the topic of virtue epistemology. The prospects of virtue-theoretic analyses of knowledge depend crucially on our ability to give some independent account of what epistemic virtues are and what they are for. The contributions here ask how epistemic virtues matter apart from any narrow concern with defining knowledge; they show how epistemic virtues figure in accounts of various aspects of our lives, with a special emphasis on our practical lives. In essence, the essays here put epistemic virtues to work.

The book is concerned with the recent discussions in social epistemology about epistemic justification of democracy. While standard approaches to epistemic justification of democracy base their thinking on the assumption that democratic legitimacy must be grounded on the production of epistemically high-quality decisions (true, truth-sensitive, truth-conductive, correct, justified, rational, epistemically responsible and so on), this assumption is often challenged by those who do not hold that epistemic justification is either necessary or conducive to democratic legitimacy or, on the other hand, those who accept the necessity of the epistemic justification of democracy but deem that it cannot be reduced to the production of true or justified decisions. Such reactions are highly influenced by a stance regarding the status of experts within the democratic decision-making process. The book offers both a unique perspective on this debate and registers the challenge of a new discipline of applied or real word epistemology.

In this study of how we know what we know, W. Jay Wood surveys current views of foundationalism, epistemic justification and reliabilism.

This volume presents the six John Locke lectures delivered by the author in Oxford in May and June of 2005.

"Virtue ethics has attracted a lot of attention and there has been considerable interest in virtue epistemology as an alternative to traditional approaches in that field. This book fills a gap in the literature for a text that brings virtue epistemologists and virtue ethicists together."-- Back cover.

Defending an original conception of our responsibility for belief and of the relation of such responsibility to moral justification for our actions, James Montmarquet advances a detailed account of certain traits of intellectual character-the epistemic virtues-and of their relation to the responsibility for one's beliefs.

Epistemic Explanations develops an improved virtue epistemology and uses it to explain several epistemic phenomena. Part I lays out a telic virtue epistemology that accommodates varieties of knowledge and understanding particularly pertinent to the humanities. Part II develops an epistemology of suspension of judgment, by relating it to degrees of confidence and to inquiry. Part III develops a substantially improved telic virtue epistemology by appeal to default assumptions important in domains of human performance generally, and in our intellectual lives as a special case. This reconfigures earlier virtue epistemology, which now seems a first approximation. This part also introduces a metaphysical hierarchy of epistemic categories and defends in particular a category of secure knowledge.