Introduction

The notion of intellectual virtue made its contemporary debut in Ernest Sosa’s 1980 paper “The Raft and the Pyramid.” At the time, analytic epistemology was teeming with proposed solutions to the Gettier problem (Gettier 1963), newly minted objections to both internalism and externalism, and seemingly intractable disagreements between foundationalists and coherentists. Sosa (1980) drew the then iconoclastic conclusion that the notion of intellectual virtue might help us resolve the foundationalism–coherentism debate. Linda Zagzebski subsequently argued (1996) that the notion of intellectual virtue could help circumvent the debate between internalists and externalists. Zagzebski (1996, 2009) and Sosa (1991, 2007, 2015) likewise championed virtue-based solutions to the Gettier problem. In short, virtue epistemology was originally proposed as a way to solve the problems that were plaguing belief-based theories of justification (Battaly 2008).