On the evening of March 20^th, 2023, the 11^th session of the Contemporary British and American Philosophy Salon was successfully held in Room 613, School of Philosophy, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang University. This salon invited KE Xiaoyu, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Science and Technology of School of Philosophy, to give an academic lecture titled “Does Intellectual Virtue Require Emotion? An Examination of Virtue Epistemology from the Perspective of Emotion and Decision-making Psychology”, hosted by WANG Wei, a researcher of the “One Hundred Young Talents Program” of School of Philosophy. XU Xiangdong, LI Hengwei, LI Zhongwei and other teachers and students of School of Philosophy attended this lecture.

The topic of KE Xiaoyu’s lecture was the role of emotion in intellectual virtues. Virtue Epistemology argues that having intellectual virtues is the main approach for human to acquiring knowledge. There are two kinds of intellectual virtues: The first kind is similar to the virtues raised by Aristotle, such as the courage for acquiring knowledge, modesty and diligence. The second kind is the reliable cognitive faculty of human. The scholars of Virtue Reliabilism contend that human acquire knowledge not by gauge theories, but by cultivating, developing, or improving their intellectual virtues. For example, people of Aristotelian intellectual virtues and people who improve their own insight acquire more knowledge than others. Ke discussed the roles of emotion in these two kinds of “intellectual virtues” from the perspective of emotion and decision-making phycology, specifically on the following two points: First, for the first kind of intellectual virtues in Virtue Responsibilism, the role of emotion in intellectual virtues is similar to its crucial role in Aristotelian ethnic virtues, that is, appropriate emotion should be a part of virtue. However, this theoretical assumption needs more empirical studies to support it. Second, for the second kind of intellectual virtues in Virtue Reliabilism, emotion can only be regarded as “Intellectual Virtue” or “Reliable Cognitive Faculty” under certain conditions. At last, Ke discussed the possibility of the Mixed Virtue Theory and whether emotion can be considered as a case of the Mixed Virtue Theory. The basic starting point of Ke was to explore the role of emotion in Virtue Epistemology from the perspective of psychology.

After the lecture, there were heated Q&As and interaction on the nature of emotion, cognitive faculty, fittingness, sociality, the relationship between emotion and action, as well as what emotion, and the relationship between emotion and knowledge might be involved in intellectual virtues. And XU Xiangdong pointed out that how to define the cognitive faculty of emotion was important for the task of the role of emotion in Virtue Epistemology to solve. This question is involved in how to understand and define the nature of emotion, how to interpret the relationship between fittingness and truth, and a series of questions. Xu also stated that the study of Emotion Epistemology also needed to include the dimensions such as the relationship between the cognitive objects and environment, and emotion as a phenomenon of a living body. LI Hengwei expressed that the emotion in different virtues required further research: for example, what emotion might be involved in the virtue of “courage and will power”. Ke replied that the answer to this type of questions needed the supplementary studies of philosophical theories and psychological empirical studies. LI Hengwei also asked whether Zhuangzi’s emotion fitted in the case of “Zhuangzi singing beating on a basin”, as the fittingness of emotion was reflected in Chinese philosophy. How did Aristotelian theories comment on Chinese philosophical views on emotion? LI Zhongwei put forward that Emotional Training and other empirical studies could be seen as a possibility of a “Cognitive Faculty”. Finally, XU Ke, CHENG Du and CAO Xuting also participated in the discussion. As a common psychological state, emotion is closely related to many vital philosophical issues. KE believed that many achievements of contemporary emotion science could be incorporated into philosophical studies. On the one hand, the exploration on emotion philosophy cannot be separated from the knowledge of the psychological and neural mechanisms of emotion; on the other hand, some difficulties in emotion science may require the theoretical guidance of philosophers. There will be more significance results of emotion, virtue and knowledge studies in the interdisciplinary approach.