Virtue Epistemology has come a long way since Ernest Sosa first mooted its possibility in ‘The Raft and the Pyramid’, a paper about the pitfalls of coherentism and foundationalism. What makes Virtue Epistemology distinctive, as opposed to other forms of reliabilist externalism, is that the epistemic agent becomes the locus for justification rather than the belief. In the midst of a small but growing literature in this focus on the agent, two clear trends are emerging that reflect a difference in (...) interest by the authors rather than any real underlying antagonism between camps. Where faculty reliabilists like Sosa and Greco are concerned about sceptical challenges, virtue responsibilists like Zazebski or Roberts and Wood prefer to write about intellectual flourishing. (shrink)

In this article the chief lines of current American epistemological thought are outlined, as are the criticisms which each of these perspectives has received. A special emphasis is placed on the distinction between internalism and externalism. Mutual criticisms are made between the foundationalists and the coherentists, and the reliabilist standpoint is developed in detail in order to show that Virtue Epistemology is able to capture some of the best intuitions arising from the justification of belief.

Does the blasphemous nature of writing Koranic verses on naked women make for good art? Is not the very obscenity of ‘gangsta’ rap part of its appeal as music? In the face of an artist's claims to aesthetic autonomy from ethical evaluation, or even the expression of a kind of duty to transgress normal moral boundaries, Berys Gaut has dedicated 252 pages of crisp but rather dry academic review to a defence of a positive relationship between art and ethics.