On akrasia and the epistemology-ethics entanglement

Abstract

This article discusses incontinence, or akrasia, from Christopher Hookway’s virtue epistemology perspective. The aim is to establish a relationship between epistemology and ethics. The thesis is that the phenomenon has an epistemic counterpart that allows the convergence of the disciplines and promotes a debate about the validity of the distinction between theoretical and practical, between descriptive and normative. Our proposition is to thus emphasize normativity in epistemology. The main texts used are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, in which common incontinence is described in the context of virtue ethics; and Hookway’s Epistemic Akrasia and Epistemic Virtue, in which the author defends that both epistemic incontinence and virtue epistemology are possible.