EUDAIMONISM AND EPISTEMOLOGY: EPISTEMIC ASPECTS OF EUDAIMONIA AND A EUDAIMONIST APPROACH IN EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract

Eudaimonism holds that a human being's thriving, or flourishing, provides the proper standard for the structuring of her life. In this dissertation I take steps toward a eudaimonist virtue epistemology, according to which the epistemic virtues are (1) deeply entrenched, coherent dispositions to think, act, and feel, and (2) part of a holistic system of such dispositions, a system in which (a) (intuitively) epistemic traits are interrelated with, and mutually supporting with (intuitively) non-epistemic traits, and (b) the elements of this system are unified in being elements of a system of character traits that human beings need in order to flourish. I argue that eudaimonism should be understood as a view of how we ought, all-things-considered, organize our lives, not as a contemporary moral theory that gives an account of what we ought morally to do. I argue that, so understood, a eudaimonist virtue ethics avoids some of the problems it is charged with when it is understood as a contemporary normative ethical theory, including charges that it offers the wrong kind of explanation of the moral rightness or wrongness of actions, and charges that it is egoistic. Likewise, it avoids analogues to those charges that arise in epistemology, including the charge that such a view will be baldly pragmatist, telling us to believe whatever is in our best interests. Eudaimonism, on the understanding that I propose, endorses the (all-things-considered) claim that one ought to develop the epistemic virtues on the condition that such traits are traits that enable us to flourish.