Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (born 1946) is an American philosopher. She is the Emerita George Lynn Cross Research Professor, as well as Emerita Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory.
Education and career
Zagzebski received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University, her Master of Arts degree from University of California, Berkeley, and her Doctor of Philosophy degree from University of California, Los Angeles in 1979 with a dissertation on "Natural Kinds" under the supervision of Tyler Burge. She taught at Loyola Marymount University from 1979 to 1999, before joining the University of Oklahoma.
In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Philosophical work
Her research in recent years has consisted of topics such as the intersection of ethics and epistemology, religious epistemology, religious ethics, virtue theory, and the varieties of fatalism. She delivered the Wilde Lectures in Natural Religion at Oxford University in the spring of 2010 on epistemic authority. She is (2015–2016) president of the American Philosophical Association Central Division, and gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of St. Andrews in the fall of 2015 on the topic of exemplarist virtue theory. She is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (1997–1998), and past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers (2004–2007).
In 1996, Zagzebski defined knowledge as a "state of true belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue", where the word 'true' can be omitted.
According to the Aristotelian virtue theory, she defined virtue as a "deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end." and the universal human capability of achieving a good life and happiness. Moral and intellectual virtues can't be separated People who are rightly motivated to know the truth are also capable to develop specific skills, build up and assess the reliability of personal and well-formed procedures, rather than doing the same for good belief-forming processes shared between peers.
Selected works
- Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Edited with Fairweather, Abrol. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. .
- Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Edited with DePaul, Michael. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003. . .
See also
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers