Lecture 2 (March 9) recalled some important episodes in the recent history of contemporary philosophy. We showed how and why, in many respects, the emergence of the rich and complex virtue-epistemology current in classical epistemology, particularly from the 1980s onwards, can be compared to the resurgence of virtue-ethics in moral philosophy around the 1960s, within moral philosophy, of virtue ethics, a major current since Plato and even more so Aristotle, and up to the Enlightenment, strongly centered on the notion of virtue, then eclipsed by both consequentialist ethics (or ethics of consequences) and deontological ethics (or ethics of rights and duties). We have indicated the reasons for the disappointment aroused at the time (by Philippa Foot or G.EM. Anscombe, in particular) by these two approaches, while also pointing out that the often-prized virtue ethics, whose broad outlines we have presented, was not without its faults either, for reasons that will perhaps also hold true for its twin sister, "virtue epistemology", namely, a philosophy of knowledge that does not only take virtues into account but rather makes the latter one of its constitutive features. We have taken a closer look at the reasons behind the emergence of this current, which is linked to the aporias of classical epistemology, but also to differences in the way the field is represented, its extension and its priorities, or to the need to reflect, more broadly, on the very nature of epistemic virtues and their relationship to ethical or social virtues. Whatever the scope we choose to give to this reflection, it is an invaluable tool for anyone wishing to lay the foundations of an ethics of knowledge and thought, and therefore of an ethics of conduct and action.
14:30 - 16:00
