Intellectual Perseverance

Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (6):669-697 (2017)
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Abstract

This essay offers a working analysis of the trait of intellectual perseverance. It argues that intellectual perseverance is a disposition to overcome obstacles, so as to continue to perform intellectual actions, in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals. The trait of intellectual perseverance is not always an intellectual virtue. This essay provides a pluralist analysis of what makes it an intellectual virtue, when it is one. Along the way, it argues that the virtue of intellectual perseverance can be contrasted with both a vice of deficiency and a vice of excess. It also suggests that the virtues of intellectual courage and intellectual self-control are types of intellectual perseverance. The essay ends with several open questions about the virtue of intellectual perseverance. My hope is that this essay will stimulate further interest in, and analysis of, this important intellectual trait.

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Heather Battaly
University of Connecticut

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References found in this work

On Virtue Ethics.Rosalind Hursthouse - 1999 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
A virtue epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology.Ernest Sosa - 1991 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vice Epistemology.Quassim Cassam - 2016 - The Monist 99 (2):159-180.

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