Unlike traditional epistemologists, who evaluate justified beliefs with no regard to the properties of the person that holds such beliefs, virtue epistemologists argue that a justified belief is one arising out of an intellectual virtue that the agent possesses. Contemporary virtue ethics focus on the agent’s (moral) character and not on specific action-guiding rules, and likewise virtue epistemology focuses on the (intellectual) character of the agents and considers them as the primary source of value. The second commitment of virtue epistemologists is that “intellectual agents and communities are the primary source of epistemic value and primary focus of epistemic evaluation” (Greco and Turri 2011). This comes in direct opposition to the views expressed by theoreticians, such as Quine ( 1969), who argue that scholars should stop working on questions about what is reasonable for an agent to believe and should only preoccupy themselves with questions about cognitive psychology (Greco and Turri 2011). Their first commitment is their commonly shared belief that epistemology is a normative discipline. However, scholars working within the virtue epistemology tradition share two fundamental commitments that unite and define them as virtue epistemologists (Greco and Turri 2011). Virtue epistemology is a wide collection of approaches to epistemology and thus its members have significant conceptual differences and pursue a wide variety of different projects. Since then, virtue epistemology has grown substantially to the extent that some scholars have recently urged for the development of an autonomous virtue epistemology branch that is distinct from analytic epistemology (Roberts and Woods 2007 Baehr 2011). ![]() This aretaic turn in moral philosophy, led epistemologists in the 1980’s to investigate the possibility of a virtue approach to epistemology. The contemporary revival of aretaic ethics in the second half of the twentieth century (Anscombe 1958 Foot 1978 MacIntyre 1981) did not leave the field of epistemology unaffected. I illustrate, through the example of Zagzebski’s ( 1996) virtue theory, how the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues could prove promising in contemporary debates on virtue epistemology theories. The realization that Plato was the first to conceive of and develop the concept of intellectual excellences is not merely of historic significance. Episteme, which is quite similar to Pritchard’s (in: Pritchard, Millar, Haddock (eds) The nature and value of knowledge: three investigations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010) conception of understanding, is a cognitive achievement that cannot be attained by luck or testimony. In addition, I show that Plato considers episteme as the primary intellectual virtue. I argue that the Platonic conception of rational desires satisfies the motivational component of intellectual virtues while his dialectical method satisfies the success component. ![]() In contrast, my aim in this paper is to highlight the strong indications showing that Plato had already conceived of and had begun developing the concept of intellectual virtues in his discussion of the ideal city-state in the Republic. Zagzebski in Virtues of the mind: an inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996 Kvanvig in The intellectual virtues and the life of the mind, Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1992) trace the origin of the concept of intellectual virtues back to Aristotle. Several contemporary virtue scholars (e.g.
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