Ernest Sosa has made and continues to make major contributions to a wide variety of topics in epistemology. In this paper I discuss some of his core ideas about the nature of knowledge and scepticism. I start with a discussion of and objections against the safety account of knowledge—a view he has championed and further developed over the years. I continue with some questions concerning the rol...

knowledge is one of the most important accomplishments of human being in confrontation with phenomena and facts whichhe acquires through his cognitive faculties. throughout the history of philosophy, there was always this confusion that whether or not beliefs are influenced by his non-epistemic areas and external elements, and if so, is it epistemically acceptable or the agent should avoid thes...

This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen’s recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously...

Epistemic trustworthiness is defi ned as a complex character state that supervenes on a relation between fi rstand second-order beliefs, including beliefs about others as epistemic agents. In contexts shaped by unjust power relations, its second-order components create a mutually supporting link between a defi ciency in epistemic character and unjust epistemic exclusion on the basis of group me...

Duncan Pritchard (et al. 2010, 2012a, 2012b) has recently shifted his view from an account that primarily understands knowledge in terms of the safety principle (a view mainly developed in his 2005 monograph on epistemic luck) to an ‘impure’ variety of virtue epistemology, which combines the safety principle with a weakened virtue-theoretic condition, a view that he calls anti-luck virtue epist...

Epistemic virtues or epistemic values, we are told, play a major role in our assessments of the bearing of evidence in science. There is something quite right about this notion; and there is something quite wrong about it. My goal in the chapter is to explain each. In brief, what is right about the notion of epistemic virtue or value is that criteria such as simplicity and explanatory power do ...

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 buildi...

The recent literature on the theory of knowledge has taken a distinctive turn by focusing on the role of the cognitive and intellectual virtues in the acquisition of knowledge. The main contours and motivations for such virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge are here sketched and it is argued that virtue epistemology in its most plausible form can be regarded as a refined form of reliabilism, a...