1001Philosophers

Linda Zagzebski Quotes on Virtue

Linda Zagzebski's Virtues of the Mind (1996) gave virtue epistemology its most systematic statement on the ground of an Aristotelian conception of intellectual virtue. Knowledge, on Zagzebski's account, is true belief arising from acts of intellectual virtue — and the analysis of the intellectual virtues themselves (open-mindedness, intellectual courage, intellectual humility, the love of truth) is continuous with the analysis of the moral virtues familiar from Aristotelian ethics. The framework grounds Zagzebski's later work on epistemic authority, exemplarist moral theory, and the philosophy of religion, and is one of the principal contemporary alternatives to reliabilist and internalist epistemology in the Anglophone tradition.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Linda Zagzebski:

    “Knowledge is a state of cognitive contact with reality arising out of acts of intellectual virtue.”

  • Attributed to Linda Zagzebski:

    “Admiration is the seed of moral knowledge; we know the good first by recognizing it in others.”

  • Attributed to Linda Zagzebski:

    “An exemplarist moral theory begins with persons, not with principles.”

  • Attributed to Linda Zagzebski:

    “The intellectual and moral virtues are not two sets of virtues; they are aspects of one good life.”

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