 Virtue epistemologists have conceived of intellectual virtues in two relatively distinct ways And so I want to talk about that a bit too and you know get a feel for that and what's involved there Now the best way to get at these two kinds of intellectual virtue I think is to go back to Aristotle and Aristotle's views and many virtue epistemologists Go back to Aristotle in various ways. He's a he's a kind of father of virtue theoretic approaches in both ethics and Epistemology One of the founding fathers anyway So on our styles view there were two categories of Virtue they were on the one hand moral or practical virtues which are Excellences regarding action and then on the other hand they were intellectual virtues or Excellences regarding thinking and judgment and it's important to note here that the The Greek word that we're translating as virtue really could could also be translated as excellence So when we in English hear the word virtue we tend to think moral virtue But what Aristotle meant by virtue was simply excellence and basically what he was saying is there are moral or practical Excellences and then there are intellectual Excellences and he thought that these looked very different so with respect to Moral virtues or virtues that Tied to action He thought of these as what you might think of as character traits or personality traits. So an example would be the moral virtue of courage or the Let's say a moral virtue of Temperance or Being temperate in in in the way you approach pleasures Something like that. So these are different personality traits or character traits which help you to negotiate the realm of action so to speak now to salient characteristics of these moral virtues for Aristotle was one first they were the result of Habituation they were the result of doing things right over and over again And then eventually you would form the habit of doing things a certain way And it's really this habit which is the virtue. So for example Take a courageous person. How do you get to be courageous? Well in Aristotle's view you get to be courageous by doing courageous things So at first it might be difficult to do a courageous thing, but the more you do it The better you get at it and the easier it becomes until it becomes a kind of habit for you And you can do it more automatically You can do it more easily And so the courageous person is someone who through courageous action has learned to be a courageous person So it's not just a trade of the action. It's now a trade of the person another salient characteristic of Aristotle's moral virtues is that they involve Deliberate choice they they involve a kind of willfulness where The virtuous person makes the right choices The courageous person makes the right choices with respect to danger the temperate person makes the right choices with respect to pleasure or other temptations and in fact these virtues could be thought of as habits of choice or habits of will and by Virtue of being habits of choice or will there also habits of action because of course what you're choosing is how to how to act Okay, now Aristotle thought of intellectual virtues or until Intellectual excellence is in a different way these he thought of more like Intellectual faculties or or powers. So for example, he thought one intellectual incident One kind of intellectual excellence was a kind of insight into first truths or the most basic truths of reality then another kind of intellectual excellence was the power of reasoning which allowed us to Move from these first truths to figure out other important things Another example of an intellectual Faculty or power which would count as a virtue for Aristotle would be Insight into what things are good or what things are valuable a certain kind of intellectual virtue gives you kind of insight into that domain These don't necessarily Involve habituation they might but that's not sort of characteristic of them. Neither. Do they necessarily involve choice or will again? They might but that's not necessarily characteristic of them now when Contemporary epistemology first came on the scene There was early on a debate about the nature of intellectual virtues and the debate was really about whether Aristotle was right to divide Virtues into two categories Was Aristotle right that intellectual virtues should be conceived as powers or faculties As opposed to moral virtues which are conceived as character traits of personality traits Or should we think of intellectual virtues more like he was thinking of character virtues? So could we think of say intellectual courage? or intellectual Fairness Intellectual Carefulness these these would be traits with which it was argued Look quite like Aristotle's moral virtues. They are sort of character traits of personality traits They might involve deliberate choice and habituation in the way that the Aristotle's moral virtues do and so one one some Virtue epistemologists argued that you know, that's the way we should think of intellectual virtues really on the model of Aristotelian moral virtues Whereas other virtue epistemologists argued that no Aristotle was right that moral excellences are different from intellectual Excellences and it's best to think of intellectual virtues as powers or faculties and I think nowadays There's some consensus that that was probably a bad question Because there's no reason why we have to say well that either like this or like that We can easily embrace a kind of plurality of intellectual virtues We can say look there's more than one kind of intellectual excellence Some intellectual excellences are more like character traits personality traits So we might under that category say look it's an it's you know one way of being excellent is to be Intellectually careful or to be intellectually fair or to be intellectually open-minded Things like this may be intellectually courageous even These are perfectly well conceived as Intellectual excellences and therefore intellectual virtues, but right alongside that we can say there are other kinds of intellectual excellence as well so acute perception or sound reasoning or Reliable memory these are also Now talking in the terms of cognitive abilities or intellectual abilities or powers But there are also a kind of excellence in the intellectual realm. You could be better or worse at these things These are things that can be evaluated as excellent or falling short of excellence And so we just really have two kinds of intellectual excellence or two kinds of intellectual virtue So again the old debate which you might see in some of the readings or whatever the old debate about You know, what is an intellectual virtue? Is it this or that? I think it's better to just leave that debate behind and just recognize that there are two kinds of intellectual virtue