Biography:Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

Short description: American philosopher

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (born 1946) is an American philosopher. She is a George Lynn Cross Research Professor, and Kingfisher College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics at the University of Oklahoma. She writes in the areas of epistemology, philosophy of religion, and virtue theory. She was (2015–2016) president of the American Philosophical Association Central Division, and gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Saint Andrews in the fall of 2015. She is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers. She was a 2011–2012 Guggenheim Fellow.

Life and philosophy

She received her BA from Stanford University, her MA from University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD from University of California Los Angeles (dissertation: Natural Kinds).

Her research in recent years has consisted of topics such as the intersection of ethics and epistemology, religious epistemology, religious ethics, virtue theory, and the varieties of fatalism. She delivered the Wilde Lectures in Natural Religion at Oxford University in the Spring of 2010 on epistemic authority. She is (2015–2016) president of the American Philosophical Association Central Division, and gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Saint Andrews in the fall of 2015 on the topic of Exemplarist Virtue Theory. She is past president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (1997–1998), and past president of the Society of Christian Philosophers (2004–2007).

Epistemology

Zagzebski is a pioneer in the field of virtue epistemology. In Virtues of the Mind (1996), she sets out to solve certain problems in modern epistemology by developing an Aristotelian version of virtue theory, and in the course of this project she lays out a general analysis of virtue. In Divine Motivation Theory (2004) she deals extensively with problems in the relationship between reason, faith, and ethics.

She has done work on questions of epistemic value including the "espresso machine" thought experiment (a predecessor to the swamping problem) as a counter to reliabilism.

In her book, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief (2012), she defends a strong sense of epistemic authority including authority in moral and religious beliefs, and argues that belief on authority is a requirement of intellectual autonomy. This book arose out of her 2010 Wilde lectures at Oxford.

Selected works

• Exemplarist Moral Theory. Oxford University Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-19-065584-6. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/exemplarist-moral-theory-9780190655846?cc=us&lang=en&. 
• Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. Oxford University Press. 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-993647-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=T3bF5Nj70b0C. 
• On Epistemology. Wadsworth Press. 2008. ISBN 978-0-534-25234-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=Md_OLcnALG0C. 
• Philosophy of Religion: An Historical Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell. 2007. ISBN 978-1-4051-1872-9. https://books.google.com/books?id=6J8mIPT0DqAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Linda+Trinkaus+Zagzebski#v=onepage. 
• Divine Motivation Theory. Cambridge University Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0-521-53576-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=KhqPito92b8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Linda+Trinkaus+Zagzebski#v=onepage. 
• Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. 1996. ISBN 978-0-521-57826-4. https://books.google.com/books?id=w-YC4foOSBwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Linda+Trinkaus+Zagzebski#v=onepage. 
• The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge. Oxford University Press. 1991. ISBN 978-0-19-510763-0. https://books.google.com/books?id=0v9nLMBtGYcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Linda+Trinkaus+Zagzebski#v=onepage. 

Editor

• Virtue epistemology: essays on epistemic virtue and responsibility. Oxford University Press. 2001. ISBN 978-0-19-514077-4. https://books.google.com/books?id=DIXenI021DkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Linda+Trinkaus+Zagzebski#v=onepage. 
• Intellectual virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology. Clarendon. 2003. ISBN 978-0-19-925273-2. 

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

External links

• "Religious Diversity and Social Responsibility", Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2001, pp. 135–155