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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.
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