In this paper, I develop a model of personal justification that is rooted in the intellectual virtues and the concept of epistemic praise. In particular, I show how a character-based understanding of the virtues gives rise to an important emphasis on agents and how this provides the resources for dealing with several problems in epistemology.

This article studies the proposal of the twentieth-century anticaste scholar and writer Iyothee Thass of a millennial anticaste communitas (community) in creative opposition to caste immunitas (immunity). It argues that Thass’s casteless community makes an appeal as it withdraws from caste and Brahminism by differentiating itself from enclosure. Thass’s works sought to conceive and construct a community against caste in the vernacular both in the global and local context by way of a highly scholarly as well as creative engagement with (...) Buddhism and the Tamil literary archive. In the colonial and nationalist context of the nineteenth century in the Indian subcontinent, his interpretative imaginaire of the history of India—Indhira Dhesa Sarithiram—was a pedagogy that establishes a belonging to world community and, at the same time, to one’s own vernacular communities. (shrink)