Moral Psychology of Curiosity

Ilhan Inan (PhD, UC-Santa Barbara) recently joined the Philosophy Department at Koç University in Istanbul. Prior to that he taught at Bogaziçi University Philosophy Department for twenty years. He is the author of The Philosophy of Curiosity (Routledge, 2012) and his philosophical articles appeared in many respected international and national journals including Philosophical Studies. He works on philosophy of language, broadly construed, to include philosophy of curiosity, evolution of language, creativity, and inostensible reference. He published articles on how curiosity relates to belief, acquaintance and creativity and is currently working on two book manuscripts on the subjects of truth and philosophical curiosity.Lani Watson (PhD, Edinburgh) is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her interdisciplinary research spans the fields of philosophy, educational theory, and experimental psycholinguistics, focusing on the role that questions and questioning play in everyday life, politics, and education. She has recent and forthcoming publications exploring the value of student questioning in education, and the intellectual virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Her research draws on political, social, and virtue epistemology and the epistemology of education. She combines conceptual analysis with experimental methods to demonstrate the significance of questioning, inquisitiveness, and curiosity in education, especially for learning, intellectual character, and political engagement.Dennis Whitcomb (PhD, Rutgers) is Professor of Philosophy at Western Washington University. His writings cover a range of topics in epistemology broadly construed: knowledge, justification, wisdom, intellectual humility, curiosity, epistemic value, and the ethics of belief. These writings have appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion, Synthese, and Philosophical Quarterly among other venues. He is co-editor of Social Epistemology: Essential Readings (OUP 2011). His most recent work, which focuses on the speech act of question-asking, connects epistemology to the philosophy of language.Safiye Yigit is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Education at Columbia University. She has written her Master’s Thesis on ‘Curiosity as an Intellectual and Ethical Virtue’ (2011) at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey under the supervision of Ilhan Inan. For three years, she worked as a Researcher at Bogaziçi University in the research project entitled “Curiosity: Epistemics, Semantics, and Ethics” directed by Ilhan Inan. As part of the project, she co-organized an international conference in Istanbul, which gathered several philosophers working on curiosity and she has also given numerous lectures and talks in Turkey, Italy, Netherlands, Slovenia, US, UK, and Poland on curiosity. Her research areas include virtue epistemology, virtue ethics, philosophy of education and especially educating for intellectual virtues and wisdom.

• Introduction / Part 1: Nature of Curiosity / 1. Interest, Questions, and Knowledge Kevin Mulligan / 2. Curiosity, Truth, and Knowledge Ilhan Inan / 3. Curiosity, Its Objects and Varieties Nenad Mišcevic / Part 2: Moral Dimensions of Curiosity / 4. Pre-modern Christian Perspectives on Curiosity Kent Dunnington / 5. Curiosity as an Intellectual Virtue Safiye Yigit / 6. Asking the Right Questions? Confucian Curiosity and Moral Self-Cultivation Ian James KiddPart 3: Psychological Dimensions of Curiosity / 7. Constructing and Validating a Scale of Inquisitive Curiosity Kathryn Iurino, Brian Robinson, Markus Christen, Paul Stey, and Mark Alfano / 8. Examining Curiosity as Psychological Virtue and Vice Megan Haggard / 9. Some Epistemic Roles For Curiosity Dennis Whitcomb / Part 4: Epistemological Dimensions of Curiosity / 10. Curiosity, Virtuous Insensitivity, and Luck Reduction Abrol Fairweather and Carlos Montemayor / 11. Curiosity and Understanding Michael S. Brady / 12. Curiosity and Epistemic Norms Pascal Eng

With this broad and diverse collection, the neglected topic of curiosity emerges as an essential topic for philosophy, psychology, and educational theory. From conceptual, empirical, normative, and historical perspectives, the contributors insightfully relate curiosity to representation, knowledge, motivation, character, virtue and vice, and education. The volume deserves the attention of all who would like to understand curiosity and see it fostered.