to reliabilism. In her book, Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief (2012), she defends a strong sense of epistemic authority including authority in moral and religious beliefs, and argues that belief on authority is a requirement of intellectual autonomy. This book arose out of her 2010 Wilde lectures at Oxford. In the paper titled The Inescapability of Gettier Problems, Zagzebski argued that any modification of the last condition given in the Plato's definition of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB) unavoidably shall be reconducted to the unsolved case of the Gettier problem. This result is also true and valuable for any additional condition applied to the JTB. In 1996, Zagzebski defined knowledge as a "state of true belief arising out of acts of intellectual virtue", where the word 'true' can be omitted. According to the Aristotelian virtue theory, she defined virtue as a "deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end." Denying innatism, she believes virtue is disposition plus ability and the universal human capability of achieving a good life and happiness. Moral and intellectual virtues can't be separated and, more particularly, knowledge is obtained from practicing intellectual virtues like responsibility, fairness, and courage. True belief -in the forms of propositional knowledge and of cognitive contact with reality- are gained by a right disposition of the intellect to desire truth, and a good practice which sews the intellectual virtues on the personhood, like a new habit of the body. People who are rightly motivated to know the truth are also capable to develop specific skills, build up and assess the reliability of personal and well-formed procedures, rather than doing the same for good belief-forming processes shared between peers. Selected works Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility. Edited with Fairweather, Abrol. New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. . Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology. Edited with DePaul, Michael. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2003. . . See also American philosophy List of American philosophers References Footnotes Works cited Further reading 1946 births 20th-century American philosophers 20th-century Roman Catholics 21st-century American philosophers 21st-century Roman Catholics American Roman Catholic religious writers American women philosophers Analytic philosophers Catholic philosophers Epistemologists Living people Loyola Marymount University faculty Philosophers of religion Presidents of the Society of Christian Philosophers Stanford University alumni University