In many tragic plays, the protagonist is brought down by a disaster that is a consequence of the protagonist's own error, his or her hamartia, the tragic flaw. Tragic flaws are disconcerting to the audience because they are not known or fully recognized by the protagonist—at least not until it is too late. In this essay, I take tragic flaws to be unreliable belief-forming dispositions that are unrecognized by us in some sense. I describe some different types of flaws and (...) consider what we might do about them. Then I examine three types of policies for managing our tragic flaws: doxastic, dispositional, and methodological. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that one strong motivation for adopting a conciliatory stance with regard to the epistemology of peer disagreement is that the non-conciliatory alternatives are incompatible with the demands of intellectual character, and incompatible with the virtue of intellectual humility in particular. It is argued that this is a mistake, at least once we properly understand what intellectual humility involves. Given some of the inherent problems facing conciliatory proposals, it is maintained that non-conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement (...) are thus on much stronger dialectical ground than many suppose, including some defenders of this line. In particular, non-conciliatory proposals can resist the idea that epistemic peer disagreement directly weakens one’s epistemic justification, as conciliatory views maintain. This means that the epistemic justification that our beliefs in this regard enjoy, and thus our knowledge, is more secure than conciliatory approaches to epistemic peer disagreement would suggest. (shrink)

This chapter explores an unappreciated psychological dimension of intellectual humility. In particular, I argue there is a plausible connection between intellectual humility and epistemic egocentrism. Epistemic egocentrism is a well-known cognitive bias – often called ‘the curse of knowledge’ – whereby an agent attributes his or her own mental states to other people. I hypothesize that an individual who exhibits this bias is more likely to possess a variety of traits that are characteristic of intellectual humility. This is surprising because (...) intellectual humility is often regarded as an antidote to cognitive biases, whereas I claim that a particular cognitive bias (namely, the curse of knowledge) may help foster an intellectual virtue. (shrink)

Intellectual humility is a hot topic. One of the key questions the literature is exploring is definitional: What is intellectual humility? In their recent paper, “Intellectual Humility: Owning our Limitations,” Dennis Whitcomb, Heather Battaly, Jason Baehr, and Daniel Howard-Snyder have proposed an answer: Intellectual humility is “proper attentiveness to, and owning of, one’s intellectual limitations”. I highlight some limitations of the limitations-owning account of intellectual humility. And in conclusion, I suggest that ultimately these are not limitations that any viable account (...) of intellectual humility should own and that Whitcomb et al. should revise their view accordingly. (shrink)

Can one enter into an argument with one’s intellectual equals in good faith if one regards the matter in hand as already settled? Adopting such an attitude looks very much like taking a dogmatic stance, in that one is closing one’s mind to counterarguments in advance. Dogmatism is, of course, an intellectual vice. Moreover, such dogmatism seems morally problematic, in that one is failing to treat one’s adversary with due respect. While there is clearly something correct about this line of (...) thinking—dogmatism, like all intellectual vice, is obviously to be avoided—it is also maintained that, properly understood, there need be nothing intellectually viceful about engaging in an argument where one regards the subject matter as settled. Related to this point, it is contended that someone who possesses the intellectual virtue of intellectual humility may well engage in arguments in just this fashion. The upshot is that one can consistently and properly argue with both conviction and intellectual humility. (shrink)

While philosophical debates about the ethical dimension of cinema have flourished over the last few decades, discussions of cinema and virtues are still limited. And, even if virtues are explored with regard to film, humility is not often the most obvious virtue that comes to mind. As this article argues, this might in part be due to humility’s lack of expressive action and its tendency to remain in the background. In addition, the wide range of philosophical views on what actually (...) counts as virtuous humility, if it is to be considered a virtue at all, further problematises the discussion. One aspect of these disagreements is the question of humility’s compatibility with great achievement. This article aims to demonstrate both how humility can be shown on screen and reveal greatness and humility can go together in practice. For this, the author draws on contemporary philosophical accounts of the virtue of humility to examine Damien Chazelle’s 2018 film First Man, a Neil Armstrong biopic based on James R. Hansen’s biography of the same name. The article outlines how both the distinct portrayal of its main protagonist and the film’s aesthetic features, such as mise-en-scène, sound and editing, are used to convey an idea of humility that reconciles achievement, ambition and greatness with a recognition of sacrifice, serendipity and sometimes the futility of human endeavours. Consequently, First Man is not only a film about a humble main character, but also indicates how cinematic techniques can be used effectively to enable us to experience humility, thus demonstrating how films can make a distinct contribution to philosophical debates about virtues beyond mere illustration. (shrink)