•  168
    Précis of Virtues of the Mind (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 169. 2000.
  •  295
    Epistemic authority
    Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 53 (3): 92-107. 2017.
    Contemporary defenders of autonomy and traditional defenders of authority generally assume that they have so little in common as to make it hopeless to attempt a dialogue on the defensibility of epistemic, moral, or religious authority. In this paper I argue that they are mistaken. Under the assumption that the ultimate authority over the self is the self, I defend authority in the realm of belief on the same grounds as Joseph Raz uses in his well-known defense of political authority in the trad…Read more
  •  76
    Exemplarist Moral Theory
    Oup Usa. 2017.
    In Exemplarist Moral Theory of Linda Zagzebski presents an original moral theory based on direct reference to exemplars of goodness, whom we identify through the emotion of admiration. Using examples of heroes, saints, and sages, she shows how narratives of exemplars and empirical work on the most admirable persons can be incorporated into the theory to serve both theoretical and practical purposes.
  •  49
    Emotion and Moral Judgment
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1): 104-124. 2003.
    This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a “thick affective concept” A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick…Read more
  • Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred thirteenth Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, IL, on March 4, 2016.
  •  134
    Divine Motivation Theory
    Cambridge University Press. 2004.
    Widely regarded as one of the foremost figures in contemporary philosophy of religion, this book by Linda Zagzebski is a major contribution to ethical theory and theological ethics. At the core of the book lies a form of virtue theory based on the emotions. Quite distinct from deontological, consequentialist and teleological virtue theories, this one has a particular theological, indeed Christian, foundation. The theory helps to resolve philosophical problems and puzzles of various kinds: the di…Read more
  •  546
    Almost all theories of knowledge and justified belief employ moral concepts and forms of argument borrowed from moral theories, but none of them pay attention to the current renaissance in virtue ethics. This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the …Read more
  • Natural Kinds
    Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 1979.
  • The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge
    International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 34 (2): 118-120. 1993.
    This original analysis examines the three leading traditional solutions to the dilemma of divine foreknowledge and human free will--those arising from Boethius, from Ockham, and from Molina. Though all three solutions are rejected in their best-known forms, three new solutions are proposed, and Zagzebski concludes that divine foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. The discussion includes the relation between the foreknowledge dilemma and problems about the nature of time and the causal …Read more
  •  32
    Religious Diversity and Social Responsibility
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4 (1): 135-155. 2001.
  •  482
    "What Is Knowledge?"
    In John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 92-116. 1999.
    Knowledge is a highly valued state in which a person is in cognitive contact with reality. It is, therefore, a relation. On one side of the relation is a conscious subject, and on the other side is a portion of reality to which the knower is directly or indirectly related. While directness is a matter of degree, it is convenient to think of knowledge of things as a direct form of knowledge in comparison to which knowledge about things is indirect. The former has often been called knowledge by ac…Read more
  •  3459
    Emotion and moral judgment
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 66 (1). 2003.
    This paper argues that an emotion is a state of affectively perceiving its intentional object as falling under a "thick affective concept" A, a concept that combines cognitive and affective aspects in a way that cannot be pulled apart. For example, in a state of pity an object is seen as pitiful, where to see something as pitiful is to be in a state that is both cognitive and affective. One way of expressing an emotion is to assert that the intentional object of the emotion falls under the thick…Read more
  •  960
    The Rule of St. Benedict and Modern Liberal Authority
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 2 (1). 2010.
    In this paper I examine the sixth century ’Rule of St. Benedict’, and argue that the authority structure of Benedictine communities as described in that document satisfies well-known principles of authority defended by Joseph Raz. This should lead us to doubt the common assumption that premodern models of authority violate the modern ideal of the autonomy of the self. I suggest that what distinguishes modern liberal authority from Benedictine authority is not the principles that justify it, but …Read more
  •  1024
  •  57
    Reply to Professor Zagzebski
    New Scholasticism 58 (4): 460-463. 1984.
  •  70
    A Modern Defense of Religious Authority
    Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 19 (3): 15-28. 2016.
  •  1
    John Martin Fischer, ed., God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom (review)
    Philosophy in Review 10 309-311. 1990.
  •  5
    ``Rejoinder to Hasker"
    Faith and Philosophy 10 (2): 256-260. 1993.
  •  1818
    The Search for the Source of Epistemic Good
    Metaphilosophy 34 (1-2): 12-28. 2003.
    Knowledge has almost always been treated as good, better than mere true belief, but it is remarkably difficult to explain what it is about knowledge that makes it better. I call this “the value problem.” I have previously argued that most forms of reliabilism cannot handle the value problem. In this article I argue that the value problem is more general than a problem for reliabilism, infecting a host of different theories, including some that are internalist. An additional problem is that not a…Read more
  •  197
    Intellectual autonomy
    Philosophical Issues 23 (1): 244-261. 2013.
  •  197
    Religious Luck
    Faith and Philosophy 11 (3): 397-413. 1994.
  •  3848
    Exemplarist virtue theory
    Metaphilosophy 41 (1-2): 41-57. 1996.
    Abstract: In this essay I outline a radical kind of virtue theory I call exemplarism, which is foundational in structure but which is grounded in exemplars of moral goodness, direct reference to which anchors all the moral concepts in the theory. I compare several different kinds of moral theory by the way they relate the concepts of the good, a right act, and a virtue. In the theory I propose, these concepts, along with the concepts of a duty and of a good life, are defined by reference to exem…Read more
  •  27
    Virtue in Ethics and Epistemology
    Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 1-17. 1997.
  •  2579
    Epistemic Authority and Its Critics
    European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 6 (4): 169--187. 2014.
  •  23
    Przedwiedza a wolna wola
    Roczniki Filozoficzne 56 (2): 465-490. 2008.
  •  608
    The Moral Gap (review)
    Philosophical Review 108 (2): 291-293. 1999.
    The title of Hare’s book refers to the gap between the demand that morality places on us and our natural capacity to live by it. Such a gap is paradoxical if we accept the “‘ought’ implies ‘can”’ principle. The solution, Hare argues, is that the gap is filled by the Christian God. So we ought to be moral and can do so—with divine assistance. Hare’s statement and defense of the existence of the gap combines a rigorously Kantian notion of the moral demand with a rigorously Calvinist notion of huma…Read more