Judgment and Agency
Ernest Sosa
Oxford University Press, USA
This book takes up issues of epistemology central to the discipline since they were posed by Plato in his Theaetetus and Meno. The most salient antecedents of the view defended may be found in the tradition extending from those texts through Aristotle, the Greek schools, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, and Thomas Reid. Issues of skepticism and the nature of knowledge are at the forefront. The answer defended now goes beyond any earlier statement, while sharing a sustained focus on judgment and epistemic agency. Beyond a basic level of animal knowledge, the tradition puts its emphasis on a level of reflective knowledge focused on judgment, and on a level of knowledge full well that is distinctive of the animal that is rational. This book develops a new and distinctive account of such judgment, and of the agency that is constitutively involved in it. The overarching virtue theory that is manifest in theory of knowledge through virtue epistemology, and its crucial concept of the apt judgment, will be found also in ethics through Aristotle’s theory of flourishing as action “in accordance” with virtue. That these are fundamentally akin is no surprise once it is clear that judgment and knowledge are forms of action: judgment being an attempt, and knowledge its corresponding achievement.