ABSTRACT
Courage is a virtue of the mind because the life of the mind—inquiring, criticizing, investigating—exposes us to a variety of harms: infringements on one's interests. If epistemic courage is often close to moral courage, then that is what one ought to expect, given the pervasiveness of epistemic concerns in life. Although epistemic courage may be more vivid in high-stakes cases like climate change research and its denialist enemies, it is also pertinent to a wider array of more everyday epistemic activities and concerns. This chapter describes some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and professional virtue. The complex ways that interests and harms of epistemic subjects converge are an important reason why reflection on epistemic courage must be sensitive to social positionality.
