ABSTRACT
Epistemic virtue figured prominently in the history of educational ideals advanced by philosophers, from the promotion of wisdom in ancient Greek philosophy to ideals of rational character (Scheffler 1991) and devotion to epistemic goods (Peters 1965; Hirst 1974) in early analytic philosophy of education. More recently, the epistemological dimensions of education remained on the agenda of philosophy of education primarily owing to the critical thinking movement, philosophy of science education, and constructivist learning theory (Siegel 1988, 2003, 2017; Lipman 2003; Adler 2004; Elgin 2007, 2011; Matthews 2003; Grandy 2007). Apart from work on the ideal of the critical thinker and open-mindedness, however, epistemic character and virtues have received little explicit attention. This is changing with the advent of virtue epistemology. Much as virtue ethics has contributed to a renaissance of scholarship on the education of moral character, virtue epistemology is rekindling interest in the education of intellectual character. Virtue ethics and epistemology prompt educational questions that other approaches to moral theory and the theory of knowledge do not, they have produced analyses of the nature of moral and intellectual virtues that are helpful to answering these questions, and their attention to these matters has persuaded philosophers that the questions are worthy of their attention.
