Virtue Epistemology: Its Nature, Origin and Approaches

Virtue epistemology is a class of recent approaches to epistemology that، in contrast with analytic epistemology، focuses on epistemic evaluation of persons’ properties، rather than properties of beliefs. This paper seeks to explain the nature of virtue epistemology as well as its main approaches. Explaining the nature of epistemic virtue as a reliable belief-forming faculty and the character traits led to two approaches in virtue epistemology: reliabilism and responsibilism. Since the nature of virtue epistemology is better understood according to the nature of epistemic virtue، this element will be focused more than the others. This paper first addresses the origin of virtue epistemology and، finally، after referring to some critiques، including divergent accounts of epistemic virtue، insists that understanding the nature، importance and complication of virtue epistemology requires a more comprehensive، flexible and reasonable definition of epistemic virtue.