Epistemic virtues as part of a responsabilist approach to the epistemology of virtues

Lecture 3 (March 16) began by taking stock of the major difficulties facing the traditional epistemologist, and showed how two major conceptions of this field of epistemology are now emerging, depending on the approach favored and the priority tasks assigned to it. Within one of these approaches - the epistemology of virtues - we have indicated the two main axes around which reflection is organized: reliability and accountability. We have focused on the second axis, the responsabilist axis (Zagzebski, Montmarquet) of virtue epistemology, presenting its central ideas before beginning to evaluate them. Following H. Battaly [1], we have posed five questions that any philosopher wishing to reflect on the status of epistemic virtues must answer: 1. are virtues natural or acquired? 2. does the possession of virtue require the agent to possess intellectually virtuous motivations or dispositions to perform intellectually virtuous actions? 3. Are virtues distinct from techniques orskills? 4. Are virtues reliable? 5. What is their value? Is it instrumental, constitutive or intrinsic? We have highlighted the reasons why the responsabilist approach to epistemic virtues poses difficulties, both in terms of the general structure of virtues it presupposes, which brings us back to the classic problem of the unity of virtues, and in terms of the highly questionable reduction it implies of epistemic virtues to pure and simple moral virtues.

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