The ‘Illuminating’ Value of Love

Philotheos 5:248-254 (2005)
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Abstract

Virtue epistemology focuses on traits of persons or their faculties or psychological processes in the analysis of basic epistemic concepts such as justification or knowledge. Virtue epistemology is a reaction to a style of epistemology that makes individual beliefs and evidential relations between beliefs the elements of analysis. Following the Aristotelian distinction between moral and intellectual virtues, virtue epistemologists, from E. Sosa and A. Goldman to A. Plantinga, emphasize the epistemic value of intellectual virtues without taking seriously, if not ignoring completely, the epistemic value of moral virtues. Linda Zagzebski was one of the first virtue epistemologists to speak of the importance of moral virtues for virtue epistemology, supporting a unified account of moral and intellectual virtues and arguing that moral virtues have the potentiality to have cognitive contact with reality. Yet, despite her effort to establish moral virtues as epistemically valuable, all she achieved was to define the cognitive value of moral virtues as the person’s ethical responsibility to develop and exercise the intellectual virtues in order to promote the advancement of knowledge. ― In this paper an attempt is made to reconsider the epistemic value of moral virtues and their importance for virtue epistemology. By employing Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the cognitive value of love, we argue that moral virtues, understood as manifestations of love, not only have epistemic value but can also be so reliable that they may convert a true belief into knowledge.

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