ABSTRACT
Understanding is related to virtues in diverse ways. Arguably, intellectual humility can affect the way its possessor listens to others’ arguments and considers new data, and such humble listening and considering may lead to understanding that would otherwise have been missed (see the example of Galileo in Roberts and Wood 2007: 254). But virtues also typically incorporate understanding. For example, intellectual caution involves some understanding of inquiry (intellectual practical wisdom about it); a person cannot inquire cautiously without some understanding of the activity of inquiry, and the better she understands it the wiser her intellectual caution will be. Aristotle notes that all the moral virtues presuppose practical wisdom; we have argued that since intellectual activities are also practices, many of the intellectual virtues also presuppose a kind of wisdom (Roberts and Wood 2007: chapter 12). In the present paper, we argue that the virtue of humility is related to understanding in yet a different way: that it is the purifying absence of a certain kind of misunderstanding, and thus makes way for a humane kind of understanding. In other words, wisdom depends on it.
