Ernest Sosa is Romeo Elton Professor of Natural Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Brown University and regular Distinguished Visiting Professor at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at Brown since 1964. Since 1983, he has been the editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and since 1999, with Jaegwon Kim, the co-editor of Nous. Sosa has published essays on issues in a wide variety of philosophical areas such as metaphysics, logic, philosophy of mind, theory of action, and philosophy of language, but he has been most influential in epistemology, where he is known for advocating a virtue-based approach to the analysis of knowledge and justification with an emphasis on the importance of a reflective perspective.

What is distinctive of virtue epistemology is the order of explanation: A belief's epistemic status is to be understood in terms of the...