Almost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the concept of knowledge. This highly original work of philosophy for professionals will also provide students with an excellent introduction to epistemology, virtue theory, and the relationship between ethics and epistemology.

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Proposes an analysis of the concept of understanding. Finds three important, relevant strands of thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, among which the most important one is that understanding involves representing the world nonpropositionally, e.g. through visualization or diagrams. Taking this to be the defining characteristic, proposes that understanding is a state of comprehending nonpropositional structures of reality, such as automobiles, pieces of music or art, the character of a person, or a causal nexus. Argues that virtue epistemology is better suited than traditional epistemology to help us develop a successful analysis of understanding thus conceived. For unlike the theories from which it departs, virtue epistemology takes the objects of valuable epistemic states to consist of both propositional and nonpropositional objects.

This chapter argues that understanding and certainty are two fundamental epistemic values that have dominated epistemological writing at different periods of history. Knowledge has been associated with one of them but not both at the same time. The current period, which has been dominated by the ideal of certainty and the related notion of justification, is nearing its end and it is time to bring back the ideal of understanding. Understanding is a state of grasping nonpropositional structures of reality such as the structure of an automobile, the structure of a work of art or literature, or the structure of a human mind. This chapter proposes that understanding is a higher-level epistemic state than propositional knowledge.

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Click here if your download doesn"t start automatically By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge ([Paperback] By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge ([Paperback] Download By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind: A ...pdf Read Online By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski Virtues of the Mind: ...pdf

This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a “thick affective concept” A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick affective concept distinctive of the emotion. I argue that the most basic kind of moral judgment is in this category. It has the form “That is A” (pitiful, contemptible, rude, etc.). Such judgments combine the features of cognitivism and motivational judgment internalism, an advantage that explains why we find moral weakness problematic in spite of its ubiquity. I then outline a process I call “thinning” the judgment, which explains how moral strength, weakness, and apathy arise. I argue that this process is necessary for moral reasoning and communication, in spite of its disadvantage in disengaging the agent's motivating emotion from the judgment.