Deakin’s Dr Matthew Sharpe will give a talk at La Trobe University this week, on the topic “’Not for pleasure of the mind, or for contention, profit, fame, or power …’ Francis Bacon as Virtue Epistemologist.” It’s happening on Wednesday 16th April at 4 pm, at La Trobe University, Bundoora Campus, room ED1 402.

The abstract is as follows:
Outside of the continuing scholarly literature on his oeuvre, Francis Bacon has been widely reviled since 1945 as reducing knowledge to power, subordinating contemplative inquiry to instrumental and technical concerns, and for inventing a machine-like method which puts to violent death the long classical tradition which associated the love of wisdom with knowers’ own attempts to live well. This paper challenges these images, by reading Bacon in the light of recent analytic literature on virtue epistemology. Zagzebski and other “responsibilist” virtue epistemologists draw on Aristotle as a historical precedent for their attempts to appeal to intellectual virtues as necessary or sufficient conditions for knowing, despite their shared hesitations about Aristotle’s attempt to segregate the theoretical from the ethical virtues, seating them in a separate faculty for knowing changeless things above the hurly burly of the passions. Continue reading Francis Bacon as Virtue Epistemologist →