Dirk Koppelberg

John Greco has proposed a new sort of contextualism which exhibits a principled grounding in an agent reliabilist virtue epistemology. In this paper I will discuss Greco's two main reasons in favor of virtue contextualism. The first reason is that his account of knowledge can be derived from a more general theory of virtue and credit. The second reason consists in the thesis that a virtue contextualist solution to the lottery problem is superior to standards contextualism. With regard to the first claim, I raise some questions concerning the status and the content of the crucial conditions for Greco's theory of intellectual credit. With regard to the second claim, I try to show that his arguments do not succeed in establishing the superiority of virtue contextualism to standards contextualism. I close with some remarks on the relation among Greco's virtue contextualism, the traditional approach to the theory of knowledge and the proper domain of contextualism.

Since the publication of W. V. Quine's classic paper “Epistemology Naturalized” there have been many discussion on the virtues and vices of naturalistic epistemology. Within these discussions not much attention has been paid to a basic question: What makes an epistemology naturalistic? I give an answer by providing a logical geography of competing naturalistic positions. Then I defend naturalistic epistemology against the charge of the so-called causal fallacy. Finally I give a critical appraisal of different naturalistic theories of knowledge and introduce cooperative naturalism as the most promising research strategy