Epistemology and Wellbeing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24204/ejpr.v10i1.2527Abstract
There is a general presumption that epistemology does not have anything to do with wellbeing. In this paper I challenge these assumption, by examining the aftermath of the Gettier examples, the debate between internalism and externalism and the rise of virtue epistemology. In focusing on the epistemic agent as the locus of normativity, virtue epistemology allows one to ask questions about epistemic goods and their relationship to other kinds of good, including the good of the agent. Specifically it is argued that emotion has a positive role to play in epistemology, an example from Aquinas is used to illustrate this and to illustrate the different kinds of good involved in cognition.References
Aquinas. Summa Theologiæ. Edited by Pietro Caramello. 1952-1962. Turin: Marietti.
Aristotle. Opera. Edited by Immanuel Bekker. 1831-1870. Berlin: Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Baehr, Jason. 2012. “Four Varieties of Character-Based Virtue Epistemology”. In Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, edited by John Greco and John Turri, 33–69. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Ball, Philip. 2012. Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. London: Bodley Head.
Battaly, Heather. 2012. “Virtue Epistemology”. In Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, edited by John Greco and John Turri, 639–63. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Gettier, Edmund L. 1963. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”. Analysis 23, no. 6: 121–23. doi:10.1093/analys/23.6.121.
Greco, John. 2010. Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greco, John, and John Turri, eds. 2012. Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1962. Knowledge and Belief: An Introduction to the Logic of the Two Notions. Ithaca NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
Kornblith, Hilary, ed. 2001. Epistemology: Internalism and Externalism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
McCabe, Herbert. On Aquinas. Edited by Brian Davies. London, New York: Continuum.
O’Grady, Paul. 2014. Aquinas’s Philosophy of Religion. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant. The Current Debate. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Putnam, Hilary. Realism with a Human Face. Edited by James Conant. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press.
Roberts, Robert C., and William J. Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon.
Sosa, Ernest. 1980. “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge”. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, no. 1: 3–26. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1980.tb00394.x.
—. 2007. A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tugwell, Simon. 1988. Selected writings of Albert and Thomas. New York: Paulist Press.
van Quine, Willard O. 2003. Pursuit of truth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Zagzebski, Linda. 2004. “Epistemic Value Monism”. In Ernest Sosa and His Critics, edited by John Greco. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Zagzebski, Linda T. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
