Intellectual virtue is one of the oldest philosophical notions. It broadly denotes the intellectual capacities or traits that enable one to arrive at knowledge. The topic of intellectual virtues has once again become a flourishing and lively field in contemporary epistemology, beginning with the works of Sosa, Montmarquet and Zagzebski. While epistemology in the 20th century mostly focused on the properties of beliefs, virtue epistemologists think that by investigating the properties of believers instead, we will be in a better position to resolve various traditional epistemological questions. Thus, virtue epistemology is characterized by an approach that grounds the normativity of knowledge in the virtuous intellectual qualities of epistemic agents. Beyond this basic consensus, two central notions characterize theorizing in the field: reliability and responsibility. Reliability is the truth-conduciveness of an epistemic process. Virtue reliabilists conceive epistemic virtues as natural or deeply entrenched, reliable cognitive capacities such as good memory, acute perception, or rational inference. Virtue responsibilists, on the other hand, focus on what it is that makes for a good epistemic life or for a good epistemic character, just as virtue ethics focuses on what it is that makes for a good human life or for a good moral character. From a virtue responsibilist perspective, intellectual virtues comprise epistemically praiseworthy character traits such as open-mindedness, perseverance, or intellectual courage. A recently emerged branch of virtue epistemology deals with intellectual vices such as arrogance, closed-mindedness, dogmatism, gullibility, and intellectual cowardice, as well as wishful or conspiratorial thinking. Other recent and highly active fields of virtue epistemology are extended virtue epistemology and collective virtue epistemology. These investigate whether intellectual virtues can extend beyond the biological boundaries of persons to include features of the environment (such as technological artifacts), and whether groups can manifest intellectual virtues in a non-metaphorical sense.

This course will survey a range of topics and debates in contemporary virtue epistemology. It will cover both the reliabilist and responsibilist schools of virtue epistemology, as well as the field of vice epistemology. Some of the core topics in virtue epistemology are among the fundamental debates in epistemology or theory of knowledge more broadly, such as the debate between internalism and externalism about justification and the Gettier problem.