The overlap between virtue epistemology and the philosophy of education has been dominated by discussions of the epistemic qualities of good learners, that is, the intellectual virtues that must be nurtured in students. Not much has been said about the epistemic qualities of good teachers expressed in virtue-theoretic terms. This paper offers a preliminary account of such qualities, which are designated as pedagogical virtues. I use Battaly's pluralist conception of intellectual virtue as a starting point, then describe a pedagogical virtue (...) as an intellectual virtue with an other-regarding success or motivational component. I end with an elucidation of the pedagogical versions of two mainstream intellectual virtues, perseverance and inquisitiveness. (shrink)

Intellectual character education has been primarily expressed in terms of educating for intellectual virtues (EFIV). This aim of teaching intellectual virtues has received some challenges, such as how it fails to articulate adequate action guidance through exemplarist pedagogy, and how it neglects the pervasiveness of intellectual vice among students. To respond to these challenges, this paper considers the aim of educating against intellectual vices (EAIV) – teaching students not to develop intellectual vices or weakening those that they have already developed (...) – which comes with the emergence of vice epistemology. More specifically, I look at how negative epistemic exemplars can be used as a classroom strategy for EAIV, and demonstrate how this could address the aforementioned weaknesses of EFIV. (shrink)

Mathematical apriorists usually defend their view by contending that axioms are knowable a priori, and that the rules of inference in mathematics preserve this apriority for derived statements—so that by following the proof of a statement, we can trace the apriority being inherited. The empiricist Philip Kitcher attacked this claim by arguing there is no satisfactory theory that explains how mathematical axioms could be known a priori. I propose that in analyzing Ernest Sosa’s model of intuition as an intellectual virtue, (...) we can construct an “intuition–virtue” that could supply the missing explanation for the apriority of axioms. I first argue that this intuition–virtue qualifies as an a priori warrant according to Kitcher’s account, and then show that it could produce beliefs about mathematical axioms independent of experience. If my argument stands, this paper could provide insight on how virtue epistemology could help defend mathematical apriorism on a larger scale. (shrink)

There’s something paradoxical with a person saying ‘I am humble’; it doesn’t seem so humble to self-attribute humility in general, and intellectual humility in particular. In light of the recent interest in educating for intellectual virtues, this paradox has interesting implications to educating for intellectual humility. In particular, one might wonder how a teacher can be a model of intellectual humility to her students. If a teacher says something like ‘Here’s me being an exemplar of intellectual humility’, the paradox above (...) takes on a pedagogical angle. In this paper, I analyze the paradoxes in self-attributing and learning intellectual humility using three different accounts of this virtue, before proceeding to untangle what could be called the ‘Modeling Paradox’ of teaching intellectual humility and figure out whether this virtue can be non-problematically demonstrated to one’s students. (shrink)

Pritchard defends virtue epistemology from epistemic situationism by appealing to the notion of epistemic dependence: if knowledge acquisition is sometimes allowed to depend on factors outside the cognitive agency of the subject, then this modest form of virtue epistemology escapes the threat of the situationist challenge. This lowering of the threshold of cognitive agency required for knowledge raises the question of how to demarcate between acquisitions of true belief influenced by situational factors that count as knowledge, and those that do (...) not. I fill this gap by proposing that the dependence of knowledge acquisition on external factors comes in degrees, which allows us to look for a right degree of epistemic dependence such that it both agrees with the situationist research and preserves the normative appeal of virtue epistemology. (shrink)

The city-province distinction is usually construed in economic terms: the city is the center of consumption and wealth, while the province the center of production and raw materials. In this paper, I propose that we can also draw the distinction epistemologically; instead of distinguishing between city-dwellers and provincedwellers, we can talk about city-minded and province-minded people. In this perspective, we discover the crucial position of education as the paradoxical interplay of the city mentality and province mentality. After examining this “paradox (...) of education” as witnessed in Philippine history, especially during the Spanish and American occupations, I suggest that we can resolve the paradox by developing our system of education towards a more “nationalistic education,” as per Renato Constantino. (shrink)