Virtudes intelectuais e educação

Abstract

This work aims to apply virtue epistemology in the specific context of educational practice and theory. With its focus on intellectual character traits, such as inquisitiveness, open-mindedness and intellectual autonomy, I explore the nature of intellectual virtues, its relationship with emotions, the reasons to treat them as an aim of education, the criteria for the selection of relevant intellectual virtues in school environments and some didactic strategies to cultivate them in the school community. Chapter 1 approaches the nature of intellectual virtues, where I argue that an intellectually virtuous person is characteristically a person that possesses a valuable intellectual condition, a critical and well-informed assessment of her own intellectual condition and for being responsible for the stability and improvement of her own intellectual condition. In this chapter, I also present and explore two kinds of relations between intellectual virtues and emotions. In chapter 2, I develop three arguments in favor of the idea that we should take intellectual virtues as an aim of education. Some objections about the desirability of this idea are raised and answered. Next, I articulate five criteria for the selection of relevant intellectual virtues in school environments. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the elaboration of general strategies for the teaching of intellectual virtues. Some specific intellectual virtues are selected to show how these general strategies would look like in practice. The selection of such virtues follows one or another criterion of selection stipulated in the previous chapter.