[This book] develops an account of rationality and justice that is tradition specific.-http://undpress.nd.edu.

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition (...) from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields. (shrink)

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history (...) can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, _The Savage Mind_, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas _must_ read it; everyone interested in human institutions _should _read it."—J. H. Plumb, _Saturday Review_ "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, _The Observer_, London. (shrink)

A Short History of Ethics has over the past thirty years become a key philosophical contribution to studies on morality and ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre writes a new preface for this second edition which looks at the book 'thirty years on' and considers its impact. A Short History of Ethics guides the reader through the history of moral philosophy from the Greeks to contemporary times. MacIntyre emphasises the importance of a historical context to moral concepts and ideas showing the relevance of (...) philosophical queries on moral concepts and the importance of a historical account of ethics. A Short History of Ethics is an important contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. Ideal for all philosophy students interested in ethics and morality. (shrink)

What is an epistemological crisis? Consider, first, the situation of ordinary agents who are thrown into such crises. Someone who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired; someone proposed for membership of a club whose members were all, so he believed, close friends is blackballed. Or someone falls in love and needs to know what the loved one really feels; someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she (...) can possibly have been so mistaken in the other. For all such persons the relationship of seems to is becomes crucial. It is in such situations that ordinary agents who have never learned anything about academic philosophy are apt to rediscover for themselves versions of the other-minds problem and the problem of the justification of induction. They discover, that is, that there is a problem about the rational justification of inferences from premises about the behaviour of other people to conclusions about their thoughts, feelings, and attitudes and of inferences from premises about how individuals have acted in the past to conclusions expressed as generalizations about their behaviour - generalizations which would enable us to make reasonably reliable predications about their future behaviour. What they took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction now turns out to have been equally susceptible of rival interpretations. Such a discovery is often paralysing, and were we all of us all of the time to have to reckon with the multiplicity of possible interpretations open to us, social life as we know it could scarcely continue. For social life is sustained by the assumption that we are, by and large, able to construe each other's behaviour - that error, deception, self-deception, irony and ambiguity, although omnipresent in social life, are not so pervasive as to render reliable reasoning and reasonable action impossible. But can this assumption in any way be vindicated? (shrink)

Imagine first the case of J (who might be anybody, jemand). J used to inhabit a social order, or rather an area within a social order, where socially approved roles were unusually well-defined. Responsibilities were allocated to each such role and each sphere of role-structured activity was clearly demarcated. These allocations and demarcations were embodied in and partly constituted by the expectations that others had learned to have of those who occupied each such role. For those who occupied those roles (...) to disappoint those expectations by failing to discharge their assigned responsibilities was to invite severe disapproval and other sanctions. To refuse to find one's place within the hierarchies of approved roles, or to have been refused a place, because judged unfit for any such role, was to be classified as socially deviant and irresponsible. The key moral concepts that education had inculcated into J were concepts of duty and responsibility. His fundamental moral beliefs were that each of us owes it to others to perform her or his assigned duties and to discharge her or his assigned responsibilities. A good human being performs those duties, discharges those responsibilities, and does not trespass into areas that are not her or his concern. A philosopher who comes across the likes of J will understand his attitudes as cultural parodies, in part of Plato (conceiving of justice as requiring ‘that each do her or his own work and not meddle with many things’ Republic 433a) and in part of Kant (doing one's duty just because it is one's duty and not for the sake of any further end), authors who had influenced J's school teachers. A sociologist will entertain the suspicion that in certain types of social order it may be only in the form of parodies that some types of concept can continue to find expression. But for the moment let us put this thought on one side and return to J. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre has written a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition, designed to show how belief in God informed and informs philosophical enquiry in different historical and social settings.

This is the text of The Lindley Lecture for 1984, given by Alasdair Maclntyre, a Scottish philosopher.

According to the author of "After Virtue, " to flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. This book presents the moral philosopher's comparison of humans to other animals and his exploration of the impact of these virtues.

This discussion begins from the dilemma, posed in some earlier writing by Alasdair MacIntyre, that education is essential but also, in current economic and cultural conditions, impossible. The potential for resolving this dilemma through appeal to ‘practice’, ‘narrative unity’, and ‘tradition’(three core concepts in After Virtue and later writings) is then examined. The discussion also explores the relationship of education to the modern state and the power of a liberal education to create an ‘educated public’ very different in character from (...) the electorates of contemporary democratic regimes. It concludes with some remarks on the role of education in combating prejudice against certain kinds of human difference. (shrink)

‘Applied ethics’, as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. Such rubrics function partly as a protective device both within the academic community and outside it; a name of this kind suggests not just a discipline, but a particular type of discipline. In the case of ‘applied ethics’ the suggestive power of the name derives from a particular conception of the relationship of ethics to what goes on under (...) the rubric of ‘applied ethics’. Not everyone who conducts activities under that rubric owes allegiance to this conception and there are doubtless some who would repudiate it as strongly as I do. But it is that dominant conception from which most work in this area derives or aspires to derive its philosophical legitimacy. What is that conception? (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most controversial philosophers and social theorists of our time. He opposes liberalism and postmodernism with the teleological arguments of an updated Thomistic Aristotelianism. It is this tradition, he claims, which presents the best theory so far about the nature of rationality, morality, and politics. This is the first reader of MacIntyre's groundbreaking work. It includes extracts from and his own synopses of two famous books from the 1980s, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (...) as well as the whole of several shorter works and two interviews. Together, these pieces constitute not only a representative collection of his work but also the most powerful and accessible presentation of his arguments yet available. The MacIntyre Reader concludes with Kelvin Knight 's clear, concise, and insightful overview of the development of MacIntyre's central ideas and how they have developed in his writings. Students will find this book a powerful and accessible introduction to one of the great thinkers of our time. "The publication of the new MacIntyre Reader--a fascinating anthology of his work from his Marxist beginnings to his Thomistic conclusions--provides an interesting opportunity for reconsidering the man's thought." --The Weekly Standard Kelvin Knight is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of North London. (shrink)

The 1990s saw a revival of interest in Kierkegaard's thought, affecting the fields of theology, social theory, and literary and cultural criticism. The resulting discussions have done much to discredit the earlier misreadings of Kierkegaard's works.

Contending that Marxism achieved its unique position in part by adopting the content and functions of Christianity, MacIntyre details the religious attitudes and modes of belief that appear in Marxist doctrine as it developed historically from the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach, and as it has been carried on by latter-day interpreters from Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky to Kautsky and Lukacs. The result is a lucid exposition of Marxism and an incisive account of its persistence and continuing importance.

We give a definition, in the ring language, of Zp inside Qp and of Fp[[t]] inside Fp), which works uniformly for all p and all finite field extensions of these fields, and in many other Henselian valued fields as well. The formula can be taken existential-universal in the ring language, and in fact existential in a modification of the language of Macintyre. Furthermore, we show the negative result that in the language of rings there does not exist a uniform definition (...) by an existential formula and neither by a universal formula for the valuation rings of all the finite extensions of a given Henselian valued field. We also show that there is no existential formula of the ring language defining Zp inside Qp uniformly for all p. For any fixed finite extension of Qp, we give an existential formula and a universal formula in the ring language which define the valuation ring. (shrink)

Presents MacIntyre's most explicit defense of his approach to Thomistic metaphysics. This lecture follows MacIntyre's argument in After Virtue that modern philosophy has very literally lost its way, and the problems it faces are insoluble. The difficulties are twofold, and stem from the Cartesian turn to the self in the XVith century.

The responses to my critics are as various as their criticisms, focusing successively on the distinctive character of modern moral disagreements, on the nature of common goods and their relationship to the virtues, on how the inequalities generated by advanced capitalist economies and by the contemporary state prevent the achievement of common goods, on issues concerning the nature of the self, on what it is that Marx’s theory enables us to understand and on how some Marxists have failed to understand, (...) on the differences between my philosophical stances and those both of John McDowell and of the physicalists, on the nature of human rights and of productive work, on the ancient Greek polis, and on the metaphysical commitments presupposed by my theorizing. (shrink)

The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances. In this paper I am concerned to propound an entirely negative thesis about these characteristics. It is widely held that it is of the essence of moral valuations that they are universalisable and prescriptive. This is the contention which I wish to deny. I shall proceed by first examining the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and essentially universalisable and (...) then the thesis that their distinctive function is a prescriptive one. But as the argument proceeds I shall be unable to separate the discussion of the latter thesis from that of the former. (shrink)

Findlay, J. N. The contemporary relevance of Hegel.--Kaufmann, W. The Hegel myth and its method.--Kaufmann, W. The young Hegel and religion.--Hartmann, K. Hegel: a non-metaphysical view.--Solomon, R. C. Hegel's concept of "geist."--Taylor, C. The opening arguments of the Phenomenology.--Kelly, G. A. Notes on Hegel's "Lordship and bondage."--MacIntyre, A. Hegel on faces and skulls.--Kosok, M. The formalization of Hegel's dialectical logic.--Schacht, R. L. Hegel on freedom.--Avineri, S. Hegel revisted.

Abstract: Is Knud Eiler Løgstrup's conception of the ethical demand as deeply incompatible with the central theses of 20th century French Thomistic moral philosophy as it seems to be? Discussion of this question requires attention to both the Lutheran and the phenomenological background of Løgstrup's thought; a consideration of the Danish and French social contexts in which the claims of the two moral philosophies were developed; and an enquiry into how far aspects of each are complementary to rather than in (...) conflict with the other. An historical explanation for the genesis of the kind of normativity without norms defended by both Løgstrup and Levinas is proposed. (shrink)

It is shown that the theory of fields with an automorphism has a decidable model companion. Quantifier-elimination is established in a natural language. The theory is intimately connected to Ax's theory of pseudofinite fields, and analogues are obtained for most of Ax's classical results. Some indication is given of the connection to nonstandard Frobenius maps.