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Intellectual Humility

Intellectual Humility

The Stoic virtue of acknowledging the limits of one's own knowledge and the willingness to critically examine established beliefs.

Intellectual humility (ouk eph' hēmin with regard to true knowledge) is, in Stoic philosophy, the fundamental disposition that makes the process of cognition possible. It consists in the honest acknowledgement of the limits of one's own understanding and the fallibility of previously held beliefs. This virtue is not psychologically paralyzing, but liberating: it opens the path to genuine knowledge and to philosophical progress (prokopē).