The epistemic virtues of an Ottoman scholar: Discourses on being an ʿĀlim in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Abstract

A recent trend in the history of knowledge is the study of historical discourses on scholarly practices and ideals through the lens of epistemic virtues. Realizing the centrality of virtue language to past discussions of scholarship, historians of science and humanities have increasingly drawn on the work of virtue epistemologists to investigate what good scholarship meant in particular situations. By examining specific intellectual virtues such as objectivity, impartiality, thoroughness, and creativity, they have explored how these key characteristics of scholarly personae emerged and acquired particular meanings and why they were often contested in different contexts. However, the field has thus far tended to focus on early modern European thought and the responsibilist stream of virtue epistemology. As an endeavor to contribute to this expanding field, the article aims to highlight some aspects of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman intellectual debates on being a scholar by drawing primarily on four major educational texts of the period, namely, Fayḍ al-Ḥaram and Sharḥ al-Akhlāq al-ʿAḍudiyya by Müneccimbāşī (d. 1702), Tartīb al-ʿUlūm by Sāçaḳlīzāde (d. 1732), and the anonymous Kevākib-i Sebʿa. I argue that al-malaka al-ʿilmiyya, the Ottoman term for intellectual virtue, was central to discussions of scholarly ideals and will explore the possibility of interpreting it as a form of virtue reliabilism.