Guest editors’ preface

Linda Zagzebski’s recent work on exemplarism (2006 Zagzebski, L. (2006). The admirable life and the desirable life. In T. Chappell (Ed.), Values and virtues (pp. 53–66). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[Google Scholar]
, 2010 Zagzebski, L. (2010). exemplarist virtue theory. Metaphilosophy , 41(1–2), 41–57.
[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]
, 2015 Zagzebski, L. (2015). I-Admiration and the admirable. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume , 89(1), 205–221.
[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]
)—conclusively formulated in her 2017 volume ‘Exemplarist Moral Theory’—is a neo-Aristotelian approach that finds its non-conceptual foundation in the direct reference to morally exemplary figures, identified by the agents through the emotion of admiration. This peculiar foundation marks a neat difference between Zagzebski’s exemplarist view and traditional foundational theories, which develop around a concept rather than individuals. On her theory, morally exemplary persons fix the meaning of all fundamental moral terms, such as virtue, good state of affairs, good life, duty, right action, etc.