Sunday, November 7, 2010

Siegel and Intellectual Virtues

After reading chapter two of Rationality Redeemed, I hope you have a fuller understanding of the intellectual virtues in the Toolkit, and why they may constitute aspirations and pre-conditions for inquiry and judgment generally, not just in philosophy.

Of course, it remains to be seen how we might teach them, or whether we can teach them directly at all.

2 comments:

S Fitzsimmons said...

Seems to me that Siegel and missimer are saying the same thing in two different ways. Missimer says that character is a misnomer, but i'd bet she types the qualities Suegel values as part of the Skills she teaches. And both Siegel and Missimer seem to think that the skills can / should be 'taught.'

Matt Silliman said...

There is a bit of the flavor of a false dilemma in the terminology. What Siegel calls the Character View is properly the Skills and Character View (as is clear from the text). Nobody in this discussion denies that we can and should teach the skills. Missimer's expressed position is that we can and should teach ONLY the skills. I suspect you are right, however, that she smuggles some character components into her notion of skill (e.g.: the disposition to think critically...).