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  Jorge Gracia

By PATRICIA DONOVAN

Published: February 28, 2011

The American Catholic Philosophical Association (ACPA) will bestow its most prestigious award, the Aquinas Medal, on UB faculty member Jorge Gracia.

The medal, which has been presented since 1951, is awarded annually to a philosopher working in the area of medieval philosophy or Catholic philosophy for “outstanding teaching, personal publications of permanent and scholarly value, and influence upon American philosophical thought.”

Gracia, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Chair in the departments of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, will receive the medal during the association’s annual meeting to be held in October at St. Louis University. Gracia will deliver the Aquinas Medalist Address.

As an Aquinas Medal recipient, Gracia will join the ranks some of the most important philosophers in this field of study during the past 60 years. They include Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Bernard Longeran, Joseph Owens, John Wippel, Josep Pieper, Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), G.E.M. Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Michael Dummett and Alasdair MacIntyre.

The Cuban-born Gracia was educated in Cuba, the U.S. and Canada, and received his doctorate in medieval philosophy from the University of Toronto. He joined the UB faculty in 1971.

He has written or edited more than 40 books and his contributions to the philosophical study of race and ethnicity have been groundbreaking. In 2010, he was listed in the “Blackwell Companion to Latin American Philosophy” among 40 prominent philosophers in the history of Latin America from 1500 to the present.

It is within the area of racial and ethnic studies that Gracia proposed his familial-historical view of ethnicity and his genetic common-bundle view of race. These views of race and ethnicity have helped shape the field and addressed many issues that previous theories had left unanswered.

His research and publications have focused on several fields, however, including metaphysics and ontology; philosophical historiography; philosophy of language/hermeneutics; issues of ethnicity, race and nationality, specifically Hispanic and Latino issues; medieval/scholastic philosophy; and Hispanic, Latino and Latin-American philosophy. His earlier work focused on medieval philosophy and metaphysics, while much of his recent work has focused on issues of race, ethnicity and identity.

Gracia also has been active in promoting Latin American visual artists by writing about their work and curating exhibitions here and abroad.

He was the founding chair of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee for Hispanics in Philosophy and has served as president of the Society of Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, the Society for Iberian and Latin American Thought, the ACPA and the Metaphysical Society of America.

Among his many awards and grants are a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, the 1992 John N. Findlay Prize in Metaphysics awarded by the Metaphysical Society of America and the 1988 Aquinas Medal, awarded by the University of Dallas.

He has been a member of the editorial boards of a number of major journals and currently sits on the boards of Devenires, the Ashgate Press Medieval Philosophy Series, CR: The New Centennial Review, Quaestio: Annuario di Storia della Metafisica, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Inter-American Philosophy Review and EIDE: Foundation of Ontology series, Ontos Verlag.