19730
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Epistemic virtues: love of knowledge, courage, caution, autonomy, practical wisdom... [Kvanvig]
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Full Idea:
Virtue theorists may focus on the particular habits or virtues of successful cognizers, such as love of knowledge, firmness, courage and caution, humility, autonomy, generosity, and practical wisdom.
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From:
Jonathan Kvanvig (Virtue Epistemology [2011], III)
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A reaction:
[He cites Roberts and Wood 2007] It is interesting that most of these virtues do not merely concern cognition. How about diligence, self-criticism, flexibility...?
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4366
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We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse]
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Full Idea:
Williams has expressed pessimism about the project of Aristotelian naturalism on the grounds that his conception of nature, and thereby of human nature, was normative, and that, in a scientific age, this is not a conception that we can take on board.
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From:
report of Bernard Williams (works [1971]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.11
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A reaction:
I think there is a compromise here. The existentialist denial of intrinsic human nature seems daft, but Aristotelians must grasp the enormous flexibility that is possible to human behaviour because of the open nature of rationality.
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5845
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Niceratus learnt the whole of Homer by heart, as a guide to goodness [Xenophon]
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Full Idea:
Niceratus said that his father, because he was concerned to make him a good man, made him learn the whole works of Homer, and he could still repeat by heart the entire 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'.
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From:
Xenophon (Symposium [c.391 BCE], 3.5)
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A reaction:
This clearly shows the status which Homer had in the teaching of morality in the time of Socrates, and it is precisely this acceptance of authority which he was challenging, in his attempts to analyse the true basis of virtue
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