This book is the first systematic treatment of 'responsibilist' or character-based virtue epistemology, an approach to epistemology that focuses on intellectual ...

Standard characterizations of virtue epistemology divide the field into two camps: virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. Virtue reliabilists think of intellectual virtues as reliable cognitive faculties or abilities, while virtue responsibilists conceive of them as good intellectual character traits. I argue that responsibilist character virtues sometimes satisfy the conditions of a reliabilist conception of intellectual virtue, and that consequently virtue reliabilists, and reliabilists in general, must pay closer attention to matters of intellectual character. This leads to several new questions and (...) (...) challenges for any reliabilist epistemology. (shrink)

After a brief overview of what intellectual virtues are, I offer three arguments for the claim that education should aim at fostering ‘intellectual character virtues’ like curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual honesty. I then go on to discuss several pedagogical and related strategies for achieving this aim.

__Deep in Thought_ provides an introduction to intellectual virtues—the personal qualities and character strengths of good thinkers and learners—and outlines a pragmatic approach for teachers to reinforce them in the classroom._ With a combination of theoretical expertise and practical experience, philosopher Jason Baehr endorses intellectual virtues as a rich, meaningful way to think about and understand the purpose of education. He makes a persuasive case for prioritizing intellectual virtues in the classroom to facilitate deeper learning, encourage lifelong learning, and enrich (...) teacher practice. Baehr profiles nine key virtues that enable learners to initiate the process of learning, maintain forward momentum, and overcome common obstacles. With engaging anecdotes and concrete examples, he presents a wealth of principles, postures, and practices that educators can employ in promoting essential habits of mind such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual courage. Baehr illustrates how opportunities to practice these intellectual habits can be integrated into the classroom in ways that align with current teaching practices. In addition, he shows how educators can adapt these practices to accommodate students’ identities, developmental abilities, and interests. This thought-provoking book supports all educators, especially middle and high school teachers, in teaching for intellectual virtues. _Deep in Thought_ is a philosophical and yet practical guide to one of the most important aims of education: helping students become skilled thinkers and learners. (shrink)

A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...

This paper examines the claim made by certain virtue epistemologists that intellectual character virtues like fair-mindedness, open-mindedness and intellectual courage merit an important and fundamental role in epistemology. I begin by considering whether these traits merit an important role in the analysis of knowledge. I argue that they do not and that in fact they are unlikely to be of much relevance to any of the traditional problems in epistemology. This presents a serious challenge for virtue epistemology. I go on (...) to examine the work of two other virtue epistemologists in light of this challenge and then sketch an alternative approach that reveals how the intellectual virtues might merit a substantial role in epistemology even if not a role in connection with more traditional epistemological projects. (shrink)

With its focus on intellectual virtues and their role in the acquisition and transmission of knowledge and related epistemic goods, virtue epistemology provides a rich set of tools for educational theory and practice. In particular, characteristics under the rubric of "responsibilist" virtue epistemology, like curiosity, open-mindedness, attentiveness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity, can help educators and students define and attain certain worthy but nebulous educational goals like a love of learning, lifelong learning, and critical thinking. This volume is devoted to (...) exploring the intersection between virtue epistemology and education. It assembles leading virtue epistemologists and philosophers of education to address such questions as: Which virtues are most essential to education? How exactly should these virtues be understood? How is the goal of intellectual character growth related to other educational goals, for example, to critical thinking and knowledge-acquisition? What are the "best practices" for achieving this goal? Can growth in intellectual virtues be measured? The chapters are a prime example of "applied epistemology" and promise to be a seminal contribution to an area of research that is rapidly gaining attention within epistemology and beyond. (shrink)

The paper presents some essential heuristic and constructional elements of Free Process Theory (FPT), a non-Whiteheadian, monocategoreal framework. I begin with an analysis of our common sense concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a free process. I argue that an activity is not a type but a mode of occurrence, defined in terms of a network of inferences. The inferential space characterizing our concept of an activity entails that anything which (...) is conceived of as occurring in the activity mode is a concrete,dynamic, non-particular individual. Such individuals, which I call free processes, may be used for the interpretation of much more than just common sense activities. I introduce the formal theory FPT, a mereology with anon-transitive part-relation, which contains a typology of processes based on the following five parameters relating to: (a) patterns of possible spatial and temporal recurrence (automerity); (b) kinds of components (participant structure); (c) kinds of dynamic composition; (d) kinds of dynamic flow (dynamic shape); and (e) dynamic context. I show how these five evaluative dimensions for free processes can be used to define ontological correlates for various common sense categories,and to draw distinctions between various forms of agency(distributed, collective, reciprocal, entangled) and emergence (weak, strong,as autonomous system (Bickhard/Christensen)). (shrink)

Open-mindedness enjoys widespread recognition as an intellectual virtue. This is evident, among other ways, in its appearance on nearly every list of intellectual virtues in the virtue epistemology literature.1 Despite its popularity, however, it is far from clear what exactly open-mindedness amounts to: that is, what sort of intellectual orientation or activity is essential to it. In fact, there are ways of thinking about open-mindedness that cast serious doubt on its status as an intellectual virtue. Consider the following description, from (...) Robert Roberts and Jay Wood (2007), of a ‘bright college freshman, taking an introductory course in philosophy.’ Given this student’s ‘taste for ideas,’ she .. (shrink)

In the climax to The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber writes of the stahlhartes Gehäuse that modern capitalism has created, a concept that Talcott Parsons famously rendered as the "iron cage." This article examines the status of Parsons's canonical translation; the putative sources of its imagery ; and the more complex idea that Weber himself sought to evoke with the "shell as hard as steel": a reconstitution of the human subject under bureaucratic capitalism in which "steel" becomes emblematic of modernity. Steel, (...) unlike the "element" iron, is a product of human fabrication. It is both hard and potentially flexible. Further, whereas a cage confines human agents, but leaves their powers otherwise intact, a "shell" suggests that modern capitalism has created a new kind of being. After examining objections to this interpretation, I argue that whatever the problems with Parsons's "iron cage" as a rendition of Weber's own metaphor, it has become a "traveling idea," a fertile coinage, in its own right, an intriguing example of how the translator's imagination can impose itself influentially on the text and its readers. (shrink)

Ontic structural realists hold that structure is all there is, or at least all there is fundamentally. This thesis has proved to be puzzling: What exactly does it say about the relationship between objects and structures? In this article, I look at different ways of articulating ontic structural realism in terms of the relation between structures and objects. I show that objects cannot be reduced to structure, and argue that ontological dependence cannot be used to establish strong forms of structural (...) realism. At the end, I show how a weaker, but controversial, form of structural realism can be articulated on the basis of ontological dependence. (shrink)

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt offers a unique collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers. Consisting of a substantial introduction and nine chapters, the companion encompasses Arendt's major works -- The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Revolution and The Life of the Mind -- and most salient arguments. The volume also examines Arendt's intellectual relationships with Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, David Riesman and other sociologists. Although written principally for students new (...) to Arendt's work, The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt is weighty enough to engage the avid Arendt scholar. (shrink)

This important new collection considers Jurgen Habermas's discourse theory from a variety of feminist vantage points. Feminist scholars have been drawn to Habermas's work because it reflects a tradition of emancipatory political thinking rooted in the Enlightenment and engages with the normative aims of emancipatory social movements. The essays in Feminists Read Habermas analyze various aspects of Habermas's work, ranging from his moral theory to political issues of identity and participation. The contributors share a conviction about the potential significance of (...) Habermas's work for feminist reflections on power, norms and subjectivity. (shrink)

Caring for Liberalism brings together chapters that explore how liberal political theory, in its many guises, might be modified or transformed to take the fact of dependency on board. In addressing the place of care in liberalism, this collection advances the idea that care ethics can help respond to legitimate criticisms from feminists who argue that liberalism ignores issues of race, class, and ethnicity. The chapters do not simply add care to existing liberal political frameworks; rather, they explore how integrating (...) dependency might leave core components of the traditional liberal philosophical apparatus intact, while transforming other aspects of it. Additionally, the contributors address the design of social and political institutions through which care is given and received, with special attention paid to non-Western care practices. This book will appeal to scholars working on liberalism in philosophy, political science, law, and public policy, and it is a must-read for feminist political philosophers. (shrink)

The essays in this volume present versions of feminism that are explicitly liberal, or versions of liberalism that are explicitly feminist. By bringing together some of the most respected and well-known scholars in mainstream political philosophy today, Amy R. Baehr challenges the reader to reconsider the dominant view that liberalism and feminism are 'incompatible.'.

During the autumn of 1949, Hannah Arendt completed the manuscript of The Origins of Totalitarianism. On 1 October of the same year, the People’s Republic of China was founded under the leadership of Mao Zedong. This article documents Arendt’s claim in 1949 that the prospects of totalitarianism in China were ‘frighteningly good’, and yet her ambivalent judgment, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, about the totalitarian character of the Maoist regime. Despite being the premier theorist of totalitarian formations, Arendt’s (...) interest in China was half-hearted and her analysis often wildly inaccurate. The concern of this paper, however, is less with the veracity of her remarks, than with a counterfactual question. If Arendt had known what we know now, would she have considered Maoist China to be a totalitarian regime? Put another way: to what extent is our modern picture of Mao’s regime consistent with Arendt’s depiction of the Soviet Union under Stalin or Germany under Hitler? While Arendt got many of her facts wrong, her theory of totalitarianism — as shapeless, febrile, voracious of human flesh, and endlessly turbulent — was in good measure applicable to Mao’s regime, even though she failed to recognize it. (shrink)

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, David Riesman and Hannah Arendt were engaged in an animated discussion about the meaning and character of totalitarianism. Their disagreement reflected, in part, different experiences and dissonant intellectual backgrounds. Arendt abhorred the social sciences, finding them pretentious and obfuscating. Riesman, in contrast, abandoned a career in law to take up the sociological vocation, which he combined with his own heterodox brand of humanistic psychology. This article delineates the stakes of the Arendt Riesman debate (...) by examining Arendt’s critique of social science and Riesman’s defence of a sociological interpretation of totalitarianism. In addition, the article argues that Arendt’s theory of totalitarianism misdescribed the nature of Nazi and Bolshevik societies in ways that damaged her political account more generally. Riesman intuited that weakness and, as the following article shows, modern historical research has confirmed it. (shrink)

Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism’s appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devastated for whom communism was a means of mental reorientation; and a déclassé segment of the middle class who envisaged (...) communism as a means of material and status advancement. I examine West’s three explanations for communism’s allure, and then proceed to evaluate her account. My assessment is both empirical, using sociological data on American and European communist parties, and methodological, examining the techniques of West’s style, a mix of novelistic empathy and unmasking political partisanship. This mixture I consider fatal because while the novel, like historical interpretation, allows a generous understanding of human agents, unmasking tends towards caricature and denunciation. (shrink)

My concern is with the epistemological role of traits like inquisitiveness, attentiveness, fair-mindedness, open-mindedness, intellectual carefulness, thoroughness, tenacity, and caution. I argue for two main claims, one negative and the other positive. ;Negatively, I argue that considerations of intellectual virtue do not have an important role to play in connection with any of the more traditional epistemological problems. I show that if considerations of intellectual virtue were to play such a role, it would have to be in connection with the (...) analysis of knowledge, but that any view which makes an exercise of intellectual virtue a necessary condition for knowledge is bound to fail. ;Positively, I argue that there nevertheless remain a number of interesting and important philosophical questions and issues concerning the nature and value of virtuous intellectual character which are of considerable importance to epistemology. I defend this claim in two steps. First, I argue that virtuous intellectual character is both a constituent of and a highly important means to intellectual flourishing. It follows from this that since epistemology is concerned broadly with the more important or valuable philosophical dimensions of the intellectual life, insofar as there are philosophical questions and issues to be pursued in connection with the intellectual virtues, these have an important role to play in epistemology. Second, I go on to elucidate and discuss a number of these questions and issues, most of which are concerned with the nature and value of virtuous intellectual character as such. ;I conclude, then, that considerations of intellectual virtue do have an important role to play in epistemology, even if not in connection with any of the more traditional epistemological projects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper considers the four ways that the concept of ‘irrationality’ has been employed by members of the European peace movement in their evaluation of current bloc tensions. Against Bernard Williams who has recently taken issue with the peace movement's alleged tendency to dismiss political realities, the present author argues that the use of the language of irrationality reveals just the opposite orientation. Finally, it is argued that although the language of irrationality constitutes a powerful descriptive and normative instrument, (...) as an explanation of the Cold War it is a nonstarter. (shrink)

In her Choosing Well, Chrisoula Andreou puts forth an account of instrumental rationality that is revisionary in two respects. First, it changes the goalpost or standard of instrumental rationality to include “categorial” appraisal responses, alongside preferences, which are relational. Second, her account is explicitly diachronic, applying to series of choices as well as isolated ones. Andreou takes both revisions to be necessary for dealing with problematic choice scenarios agents with disorderly preferences might find themselves in. Focusing on problem cases involving (...) cyclical preferences, I will first argue that her first revision is undermotivated once we accept the second. If we are willing to grant that there are diachronic rationality constraints, the preference-based picture can get us further than Andreou acknowledges. I will then turn to present additional grounds for rejecting the preference-based picture. However, these grounds also seem to undermine Andreou’s own appeal to categorial appraisal responses. (shrink)

The concept of wisdom is largely ignored by contemporary philosophers. But given recent movements in the fields of ethics and epistemology, the time is ripe for a return to this concept. This article lays some groundwork for further philosophical work in ethics and epistemology on wisdom. Its focus is the distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom or between phronesis and sophia . Several accounts of this distinction are considered and rejected. A more plausible, but also considerably more complex, account (...) is offered. The discussion sheds light on the relation between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, and on the positive character of each. (shrink)

General Process Theory (GPT) is a new (non-Whiteheadian) process ontology. According to GPT the domains of scientific inquiry and everyday practice consist of configurations of ‘goings-on’ or ‘dynamics’ that can be technically defined as concrete, dynamic, non-particular individuals called general processes. The paper offers a brief introduction to GPT in order to provide ontological foundations for research programs such as interactivism that centrally rely on the notions of ‘process,’ ‘interaction,’ and ‘emergence.’ I begin with an analysis of our common sense (...) concept of activities, which plays a crucial heuristic role in the development of the notion of a general process. General processes are not individuated in terms of their location but in terms of ‘what they do,’ i.e., in terms of their dynamic relationships in the basic sense of one process being part of another. The formal framework of GPT is thus an extensional mereology, albeit a non-classical theory with a non-transitive part-relation. After a brief sketch of basic notions and strategies of the GPT-framework I show how the latter may be applied to distinguish between causal, mechanistic, functional, self-maintaining, and recursively self-maintaining interactions, all of which involve ‘emergent phenomena’ in various senses of the term. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between intellectual virtues and critical thinking, both as such and as educational ends worth pursuing. The first half of the paper examines the intersection of intellectual virtue and critical thinking. The second half addresses a recent argument to the effect that educating for intellectual virtues (in contrast to educating for critical thinking) is insufficiently action-guiding and therefore lacks a suitable pedagogy.

Virtue Epistemology Virtue epistemology is a collection of recent approaches to epistemology that give epistemic or intellectual virtue concepts an important and fundamental role. Virtue epistemologists can be divided into two groups, each accepting a different conception of what an intellectual virtue is. Virtue reliabilists conceive of intellectual virtues as stable, reliable and truth-conducive cognitive … Continue reading Virtue Epistemology →.

Risk-weighted expected utility theory is motivated by small-world problems like the Allais paradox, but it is a grand-world theory by nature. And, at the grand-world level, its ability to handle the Allais paradox is dubious. The REU model described in Risk and Rationality turns out to be risk-seeking rather than risk-averse on one natural way of formulating the Allais gambles in the grand-world context. This result illustrates a general problem with the case for REU theory, we argue. There is a (...) tension between the small-world thinking marshaled against standard expected utility theory, and the grand-world thinking inherent to the risk-weighted alternative. (shrink)

While Okin's feminist appropriation of Rawls's theory of justice requires that principles of justice be applied directly to the family, Rawls seems to require only that the family be minimally just. Rawls's recent proposal dulls the critical edge of liberalism by capitulating too much to those holding sexist doctrines. Okin's proposal, however, is insufficiently flexible. An alternative account of the relation of the political and the nonpolitical is offered by Jürgen Habermas.

The paper traces, historically and systematically, the influence of Carnap’s philosophical program on the writings of Nelson Goodman, focusing on the relationship between Carnap’s Aufbau and Goodman’s Structure of Appearance. In particular, drawing on unpublished material from the Carnap Research Archives, I show that Carnap had already anticipated Goodman’s criticism of the method of quasi-analysis and that Goodman misconstrued the status of this procedure on several counts. I also argue that Carnap’s anti-metaphysical stance left his approach with an explanatory deficit (...) which Goodman’s pragmatist pluralism is able to address. (shrink)

This article presents two related challenges to the idea that, to ensure policy evaluation is comprehensive, all costs and benefits should be aggregated into a single, equity-weighted wellbeing metric. The first is to point out how, even allowing for equity-weighting, the use of a single metric limits the extent to which we can take distributional concerns into account. The second challenge starts from the observation that in this and many other ways, aggregating diverse effects into a single metric of evaluation (...) necessarily involves settling many moral questions that reasonable people disagree about. This raises serious questions as to what role such a method of policy evaluation can and should play in informing policy-making in liberal democracies. Ultimately, to ensure comprehensiveness of policy evaluation in a wider sense, namely, that all the diverse effects that reasonable people might think matter are kept score of, we need multiple metrics as inputs to public deliberation. (shrink)

Abstract: Against the background of a great deal of structural symmetry between intellectual and moral virtue and vice, it is a surprising fact that what is arguably the central or paradigm moral vice—that is, moral malevolence or malevolence proper—has no obvious or well-known counterpart among the intellectual vices. The notion of "epistemic malevolence" makes no appearance on any standard list of intellectual vices; nor is it central to our ordinary ways of thinking about intellectual vice. In this essay, I argue (...) that there is such a thing as epistemic malevolence and offer an account of its basic character and structure. Doing so requires a good deal of attention to malevolence simpliciter . In the final section of the essay, I offer an explanation of our relative unfamiliarity with this trait. (shrink)

Processes constitute the world of human experience - from nature to cognition to social reality. Yet our philosophical and scientific theories of nature and experience have traditionally prioritized concepts for static objects and structures. The essays collected here call for a review of the role of dynamic categories in the language of theories. They present old and new descriptive tools for the modelling of dynamic domains, and argue for the merits of process-based explanations in ontology, cognitive science, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy (...) of mind, robotics, theoretical biology, music theory, and philosophy of chemistry and physics. The collection is of interest to professional researchers in any of these fields; it establishes - for the very first time - crossdisciplinary contact among recent process-based research movements and might witness a conceptual paradigm shift in the making. (shrink)