Fleeing Cuba in 1961, Jorge J. E. Gracia arrived in the USA at the age of nineteen without family and unable to speak English. Ten years later he was assistant professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over the next 50 years Gracia published dozens of books and hundreds of articles, making major contributions to numerous areas of philosophy: Latin American philosophy, race and ethnicity, Medieval philosophy, philosophical historiography, metaphysics and ontology, and theory of interpretation. This book is a critical response to Gracia's work and a tribute to his legacy. It includes a comprehensive bibliography of Gracia's philosophical works.

Classical virtue ethics, exemplified by Aristotle (d. 322 BC), asked: what can we know of human nature and the virtues by which it is perfected in order to live well? Dominant ethical theories today generally avoid the question of human nature, taking deontological (non-metaphysical) or utilitarian (maximizing perceived social benefit) approaches. Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy," sparked a revival of virtue ethics. She critiqued contemporary ethical theories and exhorted her readers to recover central features of an Aristotelian approach. Jonathan Sanford finds that despite the common origins of contemporary virtue ethics in Anscombe, the literature varies widely not just in its scope but in its basic commitments. What exactly is contemporary virtue ethics? In Before Virtue, Sanford develops strategies for describing contemporary virtue ethics accurately. He then assesses contemporary virtue approaches by the Anscombean dual standard which inspired them: the degree to which they avoid the pitfalls of modern moral philosophy and the extent to which they exemplify a successful recovery of an Aristotelian approach to ethics. Sanford finds the results to be mixed. But an underlying and unifying theme emerges: an adequate virtue theory must incorporate at least preliminary answers to the questions of the nature of human beings, our ends, and the principles by means of which our ends are best pursued. It is only in light of recognizing the significance of those questions to moral philosophy that one can begin to appreciate the contribution of Aristotelian ethics. Ultimately, Anscombe's judgment about the need to eschew what she designates as modern moral philosophy is vindicated through a recovery of Aristotelian ethics that goes further in addressing those more basic questions than has most contemporary virtue ethics. The concluding chapters of this book contribute to that recovery.

This volume addresses the subject of categories: What are they? How are they used in speaking and thinking? What role do they play in our moral deliberations? Why are there different sorts of categories? And are categories independent of our thinking and speaking, giving objective form to the world we aim to think and speak about? These and other questions concerning categories have been part of philosophy from the very beginning, and they raise foundational issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and other branches of philosophy. Yet pursuing answers to these questions has proven difficult, because investigations into categories push us to the very limits of what we can know. The essays in this volume, written by a mix of well-established and younger philosophers, bridge divides between historical and systematic approaches in philosophy as well divides between analytical, continental, and American traditions. They offer new interpretations of Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas, Buridan, Kant, Pierce, Husserl, and Wittgenstein, and they challenge received views on normativity, the value of set theory, the objectivity of category schemes, and other topics. This volume, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the subject, challenges mainstream positions on category theory. It will be of particular interest to philosophers and others concerned with how the world is divided.