Xunzi (荀子) and Virtue Epistemology Cheng-hung Tsai Department of Philosophy, Soochow University chtsai@scu.edu.tw Abstract: Regulative virtue epistemology is the view that the possession of intellectual virtues regulates, guides, and enhances one’s epistemic practices, and that such intellectual virtues are something that can be cultivated to a higher degree. The question is, what kind of intellectual virtues, faculty virtues (such as sight and hearing) or character virtues (such as intellectual courage and open-mindedness), can be a candidate? Most assume that it cannot be the former. However, this paper shows that there can be a regulative faculty-based virtue epistemology, which takes cognitive faculties as intellectual virtues. I do not intend to establish such a version of virtue epistemology from scratch. Instead, I suggest that this form of virtue epistemology can be constructed from the philosophical works of Xunzi 荀子, one of the founders of Confucianism. Keywords: Intellectual Virtues, Sosa, Xunzi, Xin (the mind-heart), Perceptual Knowledge 1. Introduction Virtue epistemology generally aims to explain our epistemic practices through the notion of intellectual virtues. However, there is no general agreement among virtue epistemologists about the nature of intellectual virtues. Some virtue epistemologists (e.g., Sosa 1991; Greco 2000) consider intellectual virtues as cognitive faculties, such as perception, memory, introspection, and reasoning, whereas others (e.g., Montmarquet 1993; Zagzebski 1996) consider intellectual virtues as an epistemic agent’s character traits, such as intellectual courage, honesty, humility, and open-mindedness. Regardless of the different understandings of intellectual virtues, both camps of virtue epistemology share a common trait in the primary aim of epistemology. According to Robert Roberts and Jay Wood (2007), there are two kinds of epistemology according to how the aim of inquiry is established, namely, “analytic” and “regulative”. 1 Analytic epistemology “aims to produce theories of knowledge, rationality, warrant, justification and so forth, and proceeds by attempting to define these terms” (R&W 2007: 20; emphasis added). On the contrary, regulative epistemology, which “does not aim to produce a theory of knowledge”, 2 is an 1 The distinction was originally made by Wolterstorff (1996). 2 To say that regulative epistemology does not produce a theory of knowledge is not to say that it provides no analysis of the concept of knowledge. Regulative epistemology rejects a “theory of knowledge” that is understood as a theory that aims to give an “e-definition” of knowledge, that is, to