Philosophy Department Faculty
Jorge L. A. Garcia
Professor (Retired)
Jorge L. A. Garcia
Ph.D.
Contact
RETIRED
Email: JLAGarcia@aol.com
Education
- Ph.D., Yale University
- B.A., Fordham University
Courses
- Normative Theories
- Virtue & Action
- Normative Conflict
- Values & the Good
- 20th Century European Moral Philosophy
- Utilitarianism
- Language & Ontology of Morals
- Recent Metaethics
- Recent Neo-Kantian Moral Theory
- Introduction to Black Philosophy
- Philosophy & Race
Research Interests
- His research has focused on normative moral theory, including the concepts of goodness, desert, and virtue, and on articulating and defending a "virtues-based, role-centered, and patient-focused" moral theory, while critiquing consequentialist and other alternatives.
- In the last decade, he has written an influential series of articles philosophically developing what he calls a "volitional" conception of racism, and he is currently arguing for a deflationary approach to race and ethnicity, and for narrow limits to what can be socially constructed.
- He's addressed such bioethical issues as euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, artificial nutrition and hydration, and ethnic perspectives on medical ethics.
Department
Biography
After earning the doctorate at Yale, J. L. A. Garcia was Associate Professor in the philosophy departments of Notre Dame and Georgetown universities, Professor at Rutgers/New Brunswick, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, and Visiting Professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics & Philosophy. He was Professor in Boston College’s Philosophy Department from 2000 till retiring in 2022.Garcia has published articles, chapters, & entries on a variety of topics in normative ethical theory, metaethics, medical ethics, philosophical theory of society, and at the intersection of philosophy and Black studies. Some principal venues include American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, and Philosophical Studies (USA), as well as Mind (UK), Synthese and Erkenntnis (Europe), Philosophia (Israel), Dialogos and Critica (central America), and Philosophical Papers (Africa). His article, “The Heart of Racism” has been widely reprinted, including in French and German translations.Garcia has also served on the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on Hispanics, chaired its Committee on Philosophy and the Black Experience, and was a member of its Eastern Division’s executive board. He’s been on the Society of Christian Philosophers’ executive board; was vice-president of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy in NYC; and council member, vice-president, and president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.Garcia’s research won stipendiary postdoctoral support from the Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Harvard’s Program in Ethics & the Professions (now its Safra Center), and Boston University’s erstwhile Institute for the Study of Race & Social Division, and he was nonresident fellow in Harvard’s DuBois Institute for African & African American Research. He has consulted for the Smithsonian Institution, NEH, National Institutes of Health’s Center for Scientific Review, National Academy of Sciences(& its National Research Council), US Department of Education, the Educational Testing Service, the European Research Council, and the European Science Foundation's Community of Experts, among others.
Publications
- Health versus Harm: Euthanasia and Physicians' Duties," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, forthcoming.
- "Being Unimpressed with Ourselves: Reconceiving Humility," Philosophia, forthcoming.
- "Racial and Ethnic Identity?" in Race or Ethnicity? On Black and Latino Identity, edited by J. J. E. Gracia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), forthcoming.
- "Revisiting African-American Perspectives and Medical Ethics," in African American Bioethics: Culture, Race, and Identity, edited by Lawrence Prograis & Edmund Pellegrino (Washington: Georgetown University Press), 2007.
- "Practical Reason and Its Virtues," in Intellectual Virtue, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 81-107.