Epistemic Values

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski is Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics and George Lynn Cross Research Professor at the University of Oklahoma. She has written seven previous books, including Virtues of the Mind (1996), a landmark in virtue epistemology, and more recently Epistemic Authority (2012) and Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017). She has held a Guggenheim fellowship and fellowships from the NEH, the Templeton Foundation, and the Lilly Foundation, and has given more than two dozen named lectures, including the Gifford Lectures (St. Andrews, Scotland), the Wilde Lectures (Oxford), the Soochow Lectures (Taiwan), the Romanell Lectures of Phi Beta Kappa, and the Dewey Lecture for the American Philosophical Association Central Division. She has authored over a hundred papers. Her works have been translated into 12 languages.

Linda Zagzebski's work in epistemology is largely responsible for several sea changes in the field in the late 20th century. Zagzebski is one of the founders of contemporary virtue epistemology. Her work helped to open up three areas of inquiry that had been neglected in contemporary analytic epistemology: (1) the exploration of intellectual character virtues (e.g., open-mindedness); (2) the analysis of understanding; and (3) the discussion of the value of true belief as compared to the value of knowledge. It is not an exaggeration to say that her work helped to generate new fields in analytic epistemology, which are now burgeoning. Given the influence of Zagzebski's work on the trajectory of contemporary epistemology, this collection of papers, in my personal view, urgently fills a gaping hole in the literature.

• Introduction I. Knowledge and understanding1. What is Knowledge? 2. Must Knowers Be Agents? 3. Recovering Understanding 4. Towards a Theory of Understanding II. Intellectual Virtue5. Intellectual Virtues: Admirable Traits of Character 6. Trust7. Intellectual Virtue Terms and the Division of Linguistic Labor III. Epistemic Value8. From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology 9. The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good 10. Intellectual Motivation and the Good of Truth 11. Epistemic Value and the Primacy of What We Care About IV. Virtue in Religious Epistemology12. Religious Knowledge and the Virtues of the Mind 13. Phronesis and Religious Belief 14. Religious Trust, Anti-trust, and Reasons for Religious Belief V. Intellectual Autonomy and Authority15. Ethical and Epistemic Egoism and the Ideal of Autonomy 16. A Defense of Epistemic Authority 17. Intellectual Autonomy VI. Skepticism and the Gettier Problem18. The Inescapability of Gettier Problems 19. First Person and Third Person Reasons and the Regress Problem 20. The Moral Transcendental Argument Against Skepticism