In epistemology today, the intellectual virtues are receiving renewed attention. Contemporary normative virtue epistemology suggests that a key task of philosophy is not only to study the nature of knowledge and thought, but to promote good thinking. While not regarded as a standard thinker in the tradition of virtue epistemology, Dewey thought…

In this paper, I investigate two clashing perspectives regarding the good of the university: a socioeconomic and an epistemic perspective. I position current writing on the university in the philosophy of education as being largely socio-economic and contrast this view to an earlier tradition of writing about the university that I position as…

Two classic questions in epistemology concern whether knowledge is firstly propositional or firstly practical (the know-that/know-how debate) and whether testimony is a basic source of epistemic justification (the reductionism/anti-reductionism debate about testimony). In this paper, I consider the relationship between these two classic debates in…

In this paper, I consider intellectualist and anti-intellectualist approaches to knowledge-how and propose a third solution: a virtue-based account of knowledge-how. I sketch the advantages of a virtue-based account of knowledge-how and consider whether we should prefer a reliabilist or a responsibilist virtue-account of knowledge-how. I argue…

Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift argue that education is a positional good; this, they hold, implies that there is a qualified case for leveling down educational provision. In this essay, Ben Kotzee discusses Brighouse and Swift's argument for leveling down. He holds that the argument fails in its own terms and that, in presenting the problem…

In this essay Ben Kotzee addresses the implications of Bernard Williams's distinction between "thick" and "thin" concepts in ethics for epistemology and for education. Kotzee holds that, as in the case of ethics, one may distinguish between "thick" and "thin" concepts of epistemology and, further, that this distinction points to the importance of…

In education, "constructivism" constitutes the "grand unified theory" of the moment. In this article, I maintain that constructivism as a theory of knowledge and constructivism as pedagogy are distinct and that the question of what constructivism about knowledge implies for teaching is under-theorised. Seven classroom scenarios are sketched that…