We can pursue the Cartesian project without restricting ourselves to theology and a priori faculties. A better, broader perspective is properly sought if we pursue the project with reliance on science broadly and on our full span of epistemic competences, including the empirical as well as the a priori.

The risk pertinent to a particular attempt (and to its evaluation as an attempt of its sort) is the risk that the agent will fail to attain the end constitutive of that attempt. This risk of failure is coordinate with how likely or unlikely it may be that the agent will then succeed.

I am mainly concerned with unqualified knowledge, by contrast with the varieties of expert knowledge: scientific knowledge of various sorts, legal knowledge, medically expert knowledge, and so on.

It is also certain that when we assent to some piece of reasoning when our perception of it is lacking, then either we go wrong, or, if we do stumble on the truth, it is by accident, so that we cannot be sure that we are not in error.

Given its more substantial aim, a judgment is apt only if its constitutive alethic affirmation is not only apt but aptly apt. The subject must attain aptly not only the truth of his affirmation but also its aptness. And that in turn requires not only the proper operation of one's perception, memory, inference, etc., but also that one deploy such competences through competent epistemic risk assessment.

Arguably, if you view a real barn in bright sunlight and close by, while fully alert and otherwise in good shape, then you do know whether or not you see a barn. You have "animal" knowledge, says my virtue theory, through the first-order aptness of your judgment.

Flourishing is properly the main human end, and flourishing is activity of soul that succeeds in accord with virtue.