Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion: Metaphysics and Practice

3. SELF-IMPLICATING KNOWLEDGE

35 three Self-Implicating Knowledge The Practice of Intellectual Virtue In a teaching derived from Augustine, Aquinas identifies curiositas as a vice afflicting human cognitional activity. The vice consists in an inordinate or disordered desire for knowledge, particularly an obsession with information and minutiae that fails to nourish the intellectual and moral life of the individual . The countervailing virtue is studiositas, a rightly ordered application of the intellect to the search for knowledge. In the analysis of the vices and virtues of the intellect, we find a little-known point of intersection for Aquinas between ethics and epistemology. In developing the notion of an ethical monitoring of our cognitive activities, Aquinas draws mostly upon Christian rather than pagan sources and elevates the significance of virtues perfecting the will, which governs the ‘‘use’’ of our intellectual faculties. As he puts it, ‘‘A virtue that perfects the will such as justice or charity confers the good use of the speculative habits.’’1 Aquinas thus opens up a rich avenue of inquiry concerning our practice of intellectual virtue. The success of contemporary virtue ethics, its return to the concrete conditions of ethical practice, raises the question of the scope of virtuous Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion 36 practice. Can we conceive of the full range of our activities, including intellectual activities, as practices, involving a host of relevant virtues? Something like an affirmative response to this query has been advanced in recent years by virtue epistemologists. Indeed, recent debates in the field of epistemology are isomorphic to late-twentieth-century disputes in ethics. The dominant twentieth-century models of epistemology stress isolated acts of knowledge, seek a quantitative maximization of true propositions through the following of reliable rules of belief formation, and focus more on avoiding blame in one’s cognitive activities than on ‘‘achieving moral praiseworthiness.’’ By contrast, contemporary virtue epistemology stresses the interconnectedness and continuity of our cognitive states, the importance of habits of inquiry; it focuses more on the quality of the things known than on the mere assembling of a set of true propositions; and it eschews the notion that knowledge or understanding or wisdom could be fully rule-governed. In place of using bizarre and barren examples to tease out skeptical issues, virtue epistemology would return us to the cognitive practices embedded within ordinary life and to the examples of cognitive excellence to which we find ourselves attracted in those who have a reputation for prudence or wisdom . It would also bring to the fore comprehensive and synthetic intellectual virtues such as understanding and wisdom. Of course, just as there is an irreducible plurality of the conceptions and ranking of virtues, so too with understanding and wisdom. Rich accounts of cognitive excellence would implicitly contain claims about what human nature is and what in the real order is more or less worthy of our intellectual effort and emotional investment.2 The parallels between discussions in virtue ethics and those in epistemology are most evident in the debates over externalism and internalism as accounts of the justification of acts of knowing. Virtue epistemology brings its distinctive contribution into that discussion just as it has in the debates in twentieth-century ethical theory. So we shall begin with the state of the question regarding externalism and internalism and with whether Aquinas’s take on intellectual virtue can be neatly aligned with either camp. Second, we will consider to what extent the focus in virtue epistemology on the discovery of knowledge opens up neglected features of Aquinas’s own account of knowledge . Third, we will examine what is perhaps the most fruitful point of contact between contemporary epistemology and Aquinas: the defense, in a certain influential strain of contemporary philosophy of religion, of realism and the reasonableness of faith. Here, we will examine the way in which virtue epistemology can help recover a sense of agency for acts of human knowing, of the way the pursuit of knowledge can be conceived as a practice, a practice that is peculiarly ‘‘self-implicating.’’ Finally, we will consider whether certain moves in virtue epistemology entail an implicit metaphysical horizon. Self-Implicating Knowledge 37 Externalism, Internalism, and Aquinas In the introduction to his study of contemporary epistemology, Alvin Plantinga asserts that the ‘‘ahistoricism’’ of analytic philosophy has proven an impediment to progress in epistemology; what we need, he urges, is ‘‘history and hermeneutics.’’3 In its...