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The Importance of Being Modest

Das, N; (2019) The Importance of Being Modest. [Review]. Philosophy East and West , 69 (3) pp. 870-879. 10.1353/pew.2019.0069. Green open access

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Abstract

Vrinda Dalmiya's Caring to Know is a rich and wide-ranging book. Its aim is to extend the insights of feminist care ethics to analytic virtue epistemology. According to the theory that Dalmiya defends, a good knower possesses certain intellectual virtues that are conductive to caring interpersonal encounters. Dalmiya argues that the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata gives us the resources to construct this conception of a good knower. At a number of places in the book Dalmiya claims that her approach to the Mahābhārata is an instance of comparative philosophy: she takes some concepts from contemporary care ethics and analytic virtue epistemology and uses them to make sense of certain portions of the Mahābhārata. But treating the book merely as a work of comparative philosophy would be doing it an injustice. Dalmiya argues that interpreting the Mahābhārata as an epistemological text can help us make progress in some live debates in contemporary epistemology. However, I worry that the project isn't entirely successful in this last respect. In what follows, I explain why this is so.

Type: Article
Title: The Importance of Being Modest
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2019.0069
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2019.0069
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Philosophy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10096554
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