Volume 4, Number 2
June 2010
ARTICLE

What Knowledge Is Necessary for Virtue?

Volume 4, Number 2, June 2010, Pages 1–18
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v4i2.40
PDFPDF

Abstract

Critics contend that Aristotelianism demands too much of the virtuous person in the way of knowledge to be credible. This general charge is usually directed against either of two of Aristotelianism’s apparent claims about the necessary conditions for the possession of a single virtue, namely that (1) one must know what all the other virtues require, and (2) one must also be the master of a preternatural range of technical/empirical knowledge. I argue that Aristotelianism does indeed have a very high standard when it comes to the knowledge necessary for the full possession of a virtue, in both of these respects. However, focus on the necessary conditions for full virtue tends to obscure an important fact: some kinds of knowledge are much more important to various virtues than others are. A proper appreciation of the significance of this fact will go a long way toward answering critics’ worries about Aristotelianism’s knowledge requirements.
Copyright © 2010 Olivia Bailey
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Friendship as a Non-Relative Virtue

Rachel Friedman

Speechlessness and Linguistic Reciprocity in Arendt

Magnus Ferguson

A Defense of the Cautionary Approach to Supererogation

Alfred Archer and Seyyed Mohsen Eslami

Letting Animals Off the Hook

Nicolas Delon

Alienation and the Metaphysics of Normativity: On the Quality of Our Relations with the World

Jack Samuel

Backsliding and Bad Faith: Aspiration, Disavowal, and (Residual) Practical Identities

Justin F. White

The Red Mist

Maxime Lepoutre

Games Unlike Life: A Reply to Camp and Millgram

C. Thi Nguyen

Introduction to “Action and Production”

Pamela Hieronymi

Against Jeffrey Howard on Entrapment

Jonathan Stanhope

The Significance of a Duty’s Direction: Claiming Priority Rather than Prioritizing Claims

Marcus Hedahl

What About Ought? Response to Practical Intelligence and the Virtues

Liezl van Zyl

Portico