Virtue Epistemology: Zagzebski and Sosa

Virtue epistemology reframes the theory of knowledge around the intellectual character or cognitive faculties of the knower, drawing an explicit analogy with Aristotelian virtue ethics, which grounds right action in the stable character traits, or virtues, of the agent rather than in rules or consequences alone. Ernest Sosa's paper "The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge" (Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5, 1980, later reprinted in his collection Knowledge in Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 1991) is widely credited with launching the contemporary virtue-epistemological program; Sosa argued that both the foundationalist "pyramid" picture and the coherentist "raft" picture of justification can be reconceived, and their respective difficulties addressed, once justification is understood as arising from the exercise of reliable cognitive faculties, or "intellectual virtues" in a thin, competence-based sense, rather than from relations among propositions alone.