Jun
2

Please join us for the Annual KTS Epistemology of Education Lecture, co-sponsored by the School of Education.

What does it mean to be a good knower, and why should students – or anyone, for that matter, care?  These are the broad questions that I propose to investigate by way of an examination of the Anteater Virtues: curiosity, integrity, intellectual humility, and intellectual humility, that have been grouped together for special attention by the University of California, Irvine Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation.  To address these questions, I propose to focus on three topics: (1) How this cluster of virtues can combine to form what we might call an “intellectual character profile” that can enable students to acquire and sustain various epistemic goods, such as knowledge and understanding; (2) How possessing these virtues contributes to personal enrichment, thereby furnishing students with the motivation to cultivate these virtues, both during their academic years and in later life; and (3) How possessing these virtues contributes to the qualities of character needed for good citizenship in our day and age, thereby providing everyone interested in the health and well-being of democracies with the motivation to cultivate these virtues.  In connection with point (3), I comment on some of the systemic or structural issues that discourage the cultivation of these virtues in the United States today.

Nancy E. Snow joined the KU Philosophy Department as a tenured full professor in late August, 2022.  She was formerly Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for the Study of Human Flourishing at the University of Oklahoma.  Her research interests are in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and virtue epistemology.  She is the author of Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (Routledge, 2010), Contemporary Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and over fifty-five papers on virtue and ethics more broadly.  She is the co-author (with Jennifer Cole Wright and Michael T. Warren) of Understanding Virtue: Theory and Measurement (Oxford University Press, 2021), has edited or co-edited seven volumes. She is the series editor of “The Virtues,” a fifteen-book series published by Oxford University Press.  From 2014-2022, she has either co-directed, been the PI on, or been heavily involved with interdisciplinary grants totaling a little under $10 million.  In addition to other projects, she is currently editing a book on hope, authoring a monograph on hope, and planning work on a monograph on virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.