The Gregory Vlastos Memorial Lecture

Epistemic Luck in Ancient and Contemporary Epistemology 

Whitney Schwab, University of Maryland

Thursday, March 24, 2022

4:00-6:00 pm

Watson Hall, Room 517 

In this talk I argue that Plato and Aristotle did not take an anti-veritic luck
condition to be target-setting for their accounts of epistêmê. Veritic luck
"occurs when it is a matter of luck that one's [cognitive state] is true, given
how one forms it" (Pritchard). Thus, I argue that Plato and Aristotle did not
posit their specific conditions on epistêmê in order to exclude epistemic
states that are true by luck from counting as epistêmê. This contrasts with
today’s epistemologists’ investigations into knowledge, which are united, or
so I shall argue, by taking an anti-veritic luck condition to be target-setting.
Thus, I conclude that we should not take Plato and Aristotle's accounts of
epistêmê to be accounts of knowledge, at least not as such.