One finds a surprising number of defenses of the legitimacy of some kinds of question-begging (circular) arguments or beliefs in the literature. Without wanting to deny the importance of dialec-tical analyses of begging the question, what I do here is explore the epistemic side of the issue. In particu-lar, I want to explore the legitimacy of “epistemically circular” arguments and beliefs. My tentative conclu-sion is that epistemically circular arguments and beliefs are never legitimate
