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26The Two Greatest IdeasProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 91 21-26. 2017.
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149The Dilemma of Freedom and ForeknowledgeOxford University Press. 1991.A compelling contribution to the field, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge will appeal to students and scholars of theistic philosophy and the philosophy ...
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2The Moral Transcendental Argument against SkepticismIn Rodrigo Borges, Branden Fitelson & Cherie Braden (eds.), Knowledge, Scepticism, and Defeat: Themes from Klein, Springer Verlag. 2019.
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36Distinctive Measures of Epistemic Evaluation: Character as the Configuration of TraitsVirtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 203. 2000.
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52Précis of Virtues of the Mind (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 169. 2000.
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13ResponsesVirtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of KnowledgePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (1): 207. 2000.
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297Epistemic authorityEpistemology 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
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79Exemplarist Moral TheoryOup 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.
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50Emotion and Moral JudgmentPhilosophy 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
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Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred thirteenth Central Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, IL, on March 4, 2016.
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71Divine Motivation TheoryCambridge 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
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404Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of KnowledgeCambridge University Press. 1996.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
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The Dilemma of Freedom and ForeknowledgeInternational 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
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31[Book review] virtues of the mind, an inquiry into the nature of virtue and the ethical foundations of knowledge (review)In Stephen Everson (ed.), Ethics: Companions to Ancient Thought, Vol. 4, Cambridge University Press. pp. 808-810. 1998.
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124Divine Motivation Theory and ExemplarismEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (3): 109-121. 2016.In this paper I summarize two versions of a new form of ethical theory in which all basic moral terms are defined by direct reference to exemplars of goodness. I call the Christian form Divine Motivation Theory in a book by the same name (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and the more general form I call Exemplarist Virtue Theory (Gifford Lectures 2015) or Exemplarist Moral Theory (forthcoming 2017, Oxford University Press). In the Christian form the supreme exemplar is God. In exemplarist virt…Read more
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37Phronesis and Christian BeliefIn Godehard Brüntrup & Ronald K. Tacelli (eds.), The Rationality of Theism, Springer. pp. 177--194. 1999/2014.
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179Virtue in Ethics and EpistemologyProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 71 1-17. 1997.
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1Confianza epistémica y conflicto epistémico [Epistemic Trust and Epistemic Conflict]Dianoia 54 (62): 27-45. 2009.
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284When philosophers talk about whether it is reasonable to believe in God, they might take the high intellectual approach of presenting one or more of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, all of which have contemporary forms. Or they might take the opposite approach made popular by some Calvinist philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga who argue that a person can be reasonable in believing something without reasons to support it, and belief in God is like that. There are many beliefs for wh…Read more
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355A Defense of Epistemic AuthorityRes Philosophica 90 (2): 293-306. 2013.In this paper I argue that epistemic authority can be justified in the same way as political authority in the tradition of political liberalism. I propose principles of epistemic authority modeled on the general principles of authority proposed by Joseph Raz. These include the Content-Independence thesis, the Pre-emption thesis, the Dependency thesis, and the Normal Justification thesis. The focus is on the authority of a person’s beliefs, although the principles can be applied to the authority …Read more
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6``Foreknowledge and Human Freedom"In Charles Taliaferro & Philip L. Quinn (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 291-299. 1997.
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1188Obligation, Good Motives, and the Good (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2). 2002.In Finite and Infinite Goods, Robert Adams brings back a strongly Platonistic form of the metaphysics of value. I applaud most of the theory’s main features: the primacy of the good; the idea that the excellent is more central than the desirable, the derivative status of well-being, the transcendence of the good, the idea that excellence is resemblance to God, the importance of such non-moral goods as beauty, the particularity of persons and their ways of imitating God, and the use of direct ref…Read more
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282Intellectual virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2003.The idea of a virtue has traditionally been important in ethics, but only recently has gained attention as an idea that can explain how we ought to form beliefs as well as how we ought to act. Moral philosophers and epistemologists have different approaches to the idea of intellectual virtue; here, Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski bring work from both fields together for the first time to address all of the important issues. It will be required reading for anyone working on either side of the …Read more
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3471Emotion and moral judgmentPhilosophy 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
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30Religious Diversity and Social ResponsibilityLogos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4 (1): 135-155. 2001.
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485"What Is Knowledge?"In John Greco & Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, Wiley-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