A Critical Study of the Pure Virtue Epistemology of Zagzebski

Abstract

In the evaluation of knowledge from the epistemological point of view on one hand such as fundamentalism, coherentism, and reliabilism, and on the other hand externalism and internalism have been proposed. The pure Virtue Epistemology theory was proposed by Linda Zagzebski. According to Zagzebski, contemporary epistemology is based on virtue ethics. By modeling moral virtues and their application in epistemology, she speaks of intellectual virtues, especially understanding and phronesis. From her views, contemporary epistemology has faced issues such as wisdom ignorance and understanding, focusing on certainty, monopoly of knowledge to propositional knowledge, confusion in the sense of justification, neglecting the role of free will, and lack of attention to feeling and emotion in search of knowledge. There are many critics on the pure virtue epistemology which can be categorized into three sections: first, internal critiques derived from epistemology itself, second, critiques derived from the philosophy of mind, and third, critiques derived from the philosophy of ethics. In this study, the question is whether the epistemological theory of pure virtue is capable of responding to these critiques and whether it has internal or external consistency. By turning the evaluation of knowledge from belief evaluation to the evaluation of agent-based belief and his or her characteristic and personality traits, Zagzebski finds a way to open up and seems to be successful in doing so. The research method of this discourse is Lakatos research program with regard to the central core and seat belts and positive and negative strategies.

Keywords

• zagzebski
• intellectual virtues
• phronesis
• critique of pure virtue epistemology