Vices of the Mind
ISBN: 9780198826903
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Philosophy Philosophy of Mind;

When historians, journalists, and political analysts try to explain major events, if things are generally thought to have gone wrong then they often pin the blame on the intellectual and other failings of those responsible. For example: the flawed planning for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq has been blamed on the arrogance of senior members of the Bush administration; the failure of Israeli intelligence to anticipate the 1973 surprise attack by Israel's Arabneighbours has been explained by reference to the closed-mindedness of senior intelligence officers. Intellectual arrogance and closed-mindedness are examples of intellectual vices; this book defends a theoryof these kinds of 'epistemic' vice by explaining what they are, whether we are responsible for our flawed behaviour, and what, if anything, we can do about it. The basic premise is that epistemic vices are character traits, attitudes or thinking styles that get in the way of knowledge - but that, for them to be vices, they have to be blameworthy or deserving of criticism. The first book on this subject, Vices of the Mind is filled with relevant cases from politics and history aschapters opens with a real world example of vice in action.

Quassim Cassam is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He was previously Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, and has also taught at Oxford and UCL. He is the author of Self and World (OUP 1997), The Possibility of Knowledge (OUP 2007), Berkeley's Puzzle: What Does Experience Teach Us? (OUP 2014) with John Campbell, and Self-Knowledge for Humans (OUP 2014).

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