From Virtue Ethics to Virtue Epistemology

The field of philosophy went from a revival of virtue ethics that is said to have begun in 1958 to a revival of virtue epistemology that began (with a paper by Ernest Sosa) in 1980. The two forms of virtue theorizing have recently been pursued to a substantial extent independently of one another, and my purpose here is to try to convince you that contemporary virtue ethics has at least one lesson it can teach to contemporary virtue epistemology. There are new developments in virtue ethics that so far have no parallel in virtue epistemology, but I want to persuade you that parallel developments in the latter field might actually be useful in solving some problems, dealing with difficulties, that have faced at least one major approach to virtue epistemology: namely, the widely influential view known as responsibilism, which emphasizes epistemic virtues at the person level, that is, epistemic traits of character.