Understanding as an Intellectual Virtue

Since the publication of Linda Zagzebski’s groundbreaking Virtues of the Mind in 1996, virtue epistemologists have been notable for focusing not just on the epistemic good of knowledge, but also on the so-called “higher” epistemic goods of understanding and wisdom. ¹ The shared idea seems to be that if we think of an intellectual virtue in the way Zagzebski suggested—as an “excellence of the mind”—then there is something one-sided about focusing only on excellences such as knowledge. Instead, our epistemology should be broad enough to encompass the full range of intellectual excellences we care about, understanding and wisdom included.