Ernest Sosa's A Virtue Epistemology, Vol. I is arguably the single-most important monograph to be published in analytic epistemology in the last ten years. Sosa, the first in the field to employ the notion of intellectual virtue – in his ground-breaking ‘The Raft and the Pyramid’– is the leading proponent of reliabilist versions of virtue epistemology. In A Virtue Epistemology, he deftly defends an externalist account of animal knowledge as apt belief, argues for a distinction between animal and (...) reflective knowledge, contends that rational intuition is an intellectual virtue ; and offers responses to dream scepticism, the problem of the criterion and the value problem. Nearly all of these arguments are new, albeit consistent with Sosa's earlier work; that is, consistent with two notable exceptions. First, c ontra Sosa's ‘Replies’ in Ernest Sosa and His Critics, A Virtue Epistemology explicitly contends that safety is not required for animal knowledge. Second, unlike Sosa's Knowledge in Perspective, which arguably construes the intellectual virtues as merely instrumentally valuable, A Virtue Epistemology explicitly contends that the intellectual virtues are instrumentally and constitutively valuable. Best read in conjunction with the above monographs and Epistemic Justification, A Virtue Epistemology is mandatory reading for epistemologists and graduate students in the field. It will rightly set the standard for debates in analytic epistemology for years to come.I will summarize and raise objections to two key conclusions that are unique to A Virtue Epistemology: the ‘kaleidoscope-perceiver’ has animal knowledge but lacks reflective knowledge; unlike the k-perceiver, the ordinary perceiver has reflective knowledge. My objections …. (shrink)

In this book, Ernest Sosa explains the nature of knowledge through an approach originated by him years ago, known as virtue epistemology. Here he provides the first comprehensive account of his views on epistemic normativity as a form of performance normativity on two levels. On a first level is found the normativity of the apt performance, whose success manifests the performer's competence. On a higher level is found the normativity of the meta-apt performance, which manifests not necessarily first-order skill (...) or competence but rather the reflective good judgment required for proper risk assessment. Sosa develops this bi-level account in multiple ways, by applying it to issues much disputed in recent epistemology: epistemic agency, how knowledge is normatively related to action, the knowledge norm of assertion, and the Meno problem as to how knowledge exceeds merely true belief. A full chapter is devoted to how experience should be understood if it is to figure in the epistemic competence that must be manifest in the truth of any belief apt enough to constitute knowledge. Another takes up the epistemology of testimony from the performance-theoretic perspective. Two other chapters are dedicated to comparisons with ostensibly rival views, such as classical internalist foundationalism, a knowledge-first view, and attributor contextualism. The book concludes with a defense of the epistemic circularity inherent in meta-aptness and thereby in the full aptness of knowing full well. (shrink)

An important book by the world's most eminent epistemologist. In Epistemic Explanations Sosa develops an improved virtue epistemology and uses it to explain several epistemic phenomena.

Ernest Sosa presents a new approach to the problems of knowledge and scepticism. He argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. Sosa's virtue epistemology illuminates different varieties of scepticism, the nature and status of intuitions, and epistemic normativity.

The second part of the book presents an alternative beyond the historical positions of Part I, one that defends a virtue epistemology combined with epistemic ...

Ever since Plato, philosophers have faced one central question: what is the scope and nature of human knowledge? In this volume the distinguished philosopher Ernest Sosa collects essays on this subject written over a period of twenty-five years. All the major topics of contemporary epistemology are covered: the nature of propositional knowledge; externalism versus internalism; foundationalism versus coherentism; and the problem of the criterion. 'Sosa is one of the most prominent and most important epistemologists on the current American (...) scene.' William P. Alston, Syracuse University. (shrink)

Il est présent dans toutes les images d'un film, parfois même dans les sons. C'est un ingrédient indispensable du scénario. Il définit la singularité de l'histoire d'un film. Il porte notre désir du film, pendant et bien après son visionnage. Cet obscur objet du désir-cinéma, pensé le plus souvent par le scénariste, oriente le travail du réalisateur. John Truby, scénariste réputé, le nomme 'concept' (high concept). Pourtant, jamais le scénariste n'explique comment le concept d'un film vient à son esprit. L'inspiration (...) ne suffit pas. Maîtriser l'art du concept de cinéma, c'est comprendre la manière dont il s'articule au film, c'est apprendre à faire des films."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d’examiner la question de l’attention chez Malebranche à la lumière de travaux qui lui ont été récemment consacrés dans le domaine des neurosciences et de la phénoménologie. Il s’agit en particulier de montrer que la conception malebranchiste de l’attention est en elle-même intentionnelle et ne saurait donc se réduire à une simple attente pensée sur un modèle quiétiste. Le statut de la prière est au centre de cette analyse : l’attention comme « prière naturelle » n’est (...) pas attente de la lumière de Dieu, mais elle est toujours déjà orientée vers celle-ci et opère chez Malebranche comme cause occasionnelle. Ce rôle médiateur de l’attention s’enracine dans la théologie malebranchiste où l’attention apparaît à la fois comme un travail de l’esprit et une mise en relation avec l’autre, attention concentrée et attention conjointe. (shrink)

This paper was written for a panel session, in which I was asked to represent an analytic perspective. On reflection I found that there is no such thing, however, and that what best unifies the analytic traditions is not even a set of questions, much less a set of answers, but only agreement on certain standards of clarity and argumentation, and an interest in dialectic and debate. Certain issues have long dominated the analytic agenda, it is true, and I see (...) no better way to represent an analytic perspective than to enter into a bit of dialectic and debate on one of these, in a way that I hope will be clear and cogent. (shrink)

What modal relation must a fact bear to a belief in order for this belief to constitute knowledge of that fact? Externalists have proposed various answers, including some that combine externalism with contextualism. We shall find that various forms of externalism share a modal conception of “sensitivity” open to serious objections. Fortunately, the undeniable intuitive attractiveness of this conception can be explained through an easily confused but far preferable notion of “safety.” The denouement of our reflections, finally, will be to (...) show how replacing sensitivity with safety makes it possible to defend plain Moorean common sense against the spurious advantages over it claimed by skeptical, tracking, relevant-alternative, and contextualist accounts. (shrink)

I give an exposition and critical discussion of Sellars’s Myth of the Given, and especially of its epistemic side. In later writings Sellars takes a pragmatist turn in his epistemology. This is explored and compared with his earlier critique of givenist mythology. In response to Michael Williams, it is argued that these issues are importantly independent of philosophy of language or mind, and that my own take on them does not commit me to any absurd radical foundationalism on language or (...) mind. My own take is in line with Descartes’ two-level epistemology of cognitio and scientia, a bifurcation that protects him from vicious circularity, and is adaptable for an epistemology naturalized, whether in the way of Quine, or Moore, or Davidson. (shrink)

... With those who identify happiness [faring happily or well] with virtue or some one virtue our account is in harmony; for to virtue belongs virtuous activity. But it makes, perhaps, no small difference whether we place the chief good in possession or in use, in state of mind or in activity. For the state of mind may exist without producing any good result, as in a man who is asleep or in some other way quite inactive, but the activity (...) cannot; for one who has the activity will of necessity be acting, and acting well. And as in the Olympic Games it is not the most beautiful and the strongest that are crowned but those who compete, so those who act win, and rightly win, the noble and good things in life. (shrink)

Ernest Sosa extends his distinctive approach to epistemology, intertwining issues concerning the role of the will in judgment and belief with issues of epistemic evaluation. Questions about skepticism and the nature of knowledge are at the forefront. The answers defended are new in their explicit and sustained focus on judgment and epistemic agency. While noting that human knowledge trades on distinctive psychological capacities, Sosa also emphasizes the role of the social in human knowledge. Basic animal knowledge is supplemented (...) by a level of reflective knowledge focused on judgment, and a level of 'knowing full well' that is distinctive of the animal that is rational. (shrink)

In this concise book, one of the world's leading epistemologists provides a sophisticated, revisionist introduction to the problem of knowledge in Western philosophy. Modern and contemporary accounts of epistemology tend to focus on limited questions of knowledge and skepticism, such as how we can know the external world, other minds, the past through memory, the future through induction, or the world’s depth and structure through inference. This book steps back for a better view of the more general issues posed by (...) the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists. Returning to and illuminating this older, broader epistemological tradition, Ernest Sosa develops an original account of the subject, giving it substance not with Cartesian theology but with science and common sense. -/- Descartes is a part of this ancient tradition, but he goes beyond it by considering not just whether knowledge is possible at all but also how we can properly attain it. In Cartesian epistemology, Sosa finds a virtue-theoretic account, one that he extends beyond the Cartesian context. Once epistemology is viewed in this light, many of its problems can be solved or fall away. -/- The result is an important reevaluation of epistemology that will be essential reading for students and teachers. (shrink)

There is a controversy in contemporary philosophy over the question whether or not knowledge must have a foundation. On one side are the foundationalists, who do accept the metaphor and find the foundation in sensory experience or the like. The coherentists, on the other side, reject the foundations metaphor and consider our body of knowledge a coherent whole floating free of any foundations. This controversy grew rapidly with the rise of idealism many years ago, and it is prominent today not (...) only in epistemology proper but also in philosophy of science and even in ethics. The discussion of this issue has been lamentably hampered by confusion and misunderstanding, and in this neither side is wholly innocent. The reflections that follow are not meant to settle the controversy, but only to help us understand it more clearly. (shrink)

This paper takes up the critique of armchair philosophy drawn by some experimental philosophers from survey results. It also takes up a more recent development with increased methodological sophistication. The argument based on disagreement among respondents suggests a much more serious problem for armchair philosophy and puts in question the standing of our would-be discipline.

Le bref texte que Paul Ricœur consacre en 1986 à la psychanalyse développée par Heinz Kohut révèle une réinterprétation phénoménologique à la fois du contenu et des fonctions de l'empathie, au total considérée comme un véritable outil à l'œuvre dans l'herméneutique du soi. La vision kohutienne de la constitution du soi et du processus thérapeutique analytique produit une espèce de “dé-sentimentalisation” de l'empathie, en soulignant le rôle crucial du transfert intersubjectif, fort à distance de la théorie (freudienne) solipsiste de l'ego. (...) The short text published in 1986 by Paul Ricoeur about Heinz Kohut's psychoanalysis of the self reveals a phenomenological reinterpretation of the content and the functions of empathy, finally considered as an effective tool of the hermeneutics of the self. Kohut's model of constitution of the self and of the therapeutic analytical process produces a kind of “de-sentimentalization” of empathy, pointing to the crucial role of intersubjective transfer, far from a (Freudian) solipsistic theory of the ego. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibilities for rapprochement between reliabilism and evidentialism. It argues that the prospects for any such rapprochement between reliabilism and evidentialism are dim, and that the appearance to the contrary is mostly an illusion. The chapter draws on a paper by Jack Lyons, “Perception and virtue reliabilism”, so as to focus on the prospects for rapprochement through virtue reliabilism more specifically. Goldman's paper stops short of a full bipartisan theory of epistemic justification. The chapter includes a subtle (...) and detailed critique of evidentialism. The positive contribution of the chapter is divided into two parts. First it offers a way to think of “inferential” justification, and next it offers a way to understand “experiential” justification. According to process reliabilism, the epistemic justification of a belief derives from the reliability of the causal process that produces it. An attractive bipartisan avenue opens with a bi‐level epistemology. (shrink)

This volume addresses the recent concern over the state of education in the U.S. today by tracing the history of educational theory from its classical roots to the reforms recommended by early and later liberals.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 250-255, January 2022.