After Virtue

After Virtue
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013-10-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1623569818

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Author: Christopher Stephen Lutz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2012-04-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441176632

After Virtue is a watershed in MacIntyre's career. It follows his emergence from Marxism, but draws on Marxist sources and arguments. It precedes his move to Thomism, but already draws on Augustine and Aquinas. Because of its watershed nature, it has gained a wide readership in various fields but it treats a variety of issues in ways that are unfamiliar either to Marxists schooled in the social sciences or to Thomists schooled in medieval metaphysics. Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue provides a commentary that will be accessible to students, valuable to scholars, and useful to teachers. Students will find help to navigate the two main arguments of After Virtue, to understand its interpretation of history, and to engage its proposal for a form of ethics and politics that returns to the tradition of the virtues. Scholars will find the book useful as a general guide to MacIntyre's ethics. Teachers will find a book that can help to direct their students' reading and keep classroom discussions focused on the book's central concerns.

An Analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

An Analysis of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
Author: Jon W. Thompson
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351351915

Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 After Virtue was a ground-breaking contribution to modern moral philosophy. Dissatisfied with the major trends in the moral philosophy of his time, MacIntyre argued that modern moral discourse had no real rational basis. Instead, he suggested, if one wanted to build a rational theory for morality and moral actions, one would have to go all the way back to Aristotle. To build his arguments – which are widely acknowledged to be as important as they are complex – MacIntyre relies on two critical thinking skills above all others: evaluation and interpretation. The primary goal of evaluation is to judge the strength or weakness of arguments, asking how acceptable a given line of reasoning is, and how adequate it is to the situation. In After Virtue, MacIntyre applies incisive evaluation skills to major positions and figures in moral philosophy one after the other – showing how and why Aristotle’s template remains a stronger way of considering moral questions. Throughout this process, MacIntyre also relies on his interpretative skills. As MacIntyre knows, clarifying meanings, questioning definitions, and laying down definitions of his key terms is as vital to advancing his arguments as it is to evaluating those of other philosophers.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2016-11-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 110717645X

MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue
Author: Thomas D. D'Andrea
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2006
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780754651123

Tradition, Rationality and Virtue provides the first comprehensive and detailed treatment of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In this book, Thomas D'Andrea presents an accessible critical study of the full range of MacIntyre's thought, across ethical theory, psychoanalytic theory, social and political philosophy, Marxist theory, and the philosophy of religion. Moving from the roots of MacIntyre's thought in ethical inquiry, this book examines MacIntyre's treatment of Marx, Christianity, and the nature of human action and discusses in depth the development and applications of MacIntyre's After Virtue project. The book culminates in an examination of major internal and external criticisms of MacIntyre's work and a consideration of its future directions.

Virtue and Politics

Virtue and Politics
Author: Paul Blackledge
Publisher:
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2020-12
Genre: Communism
ISBN: 9780268075804

The essays in this collection explore the implications of Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of liberalism, capitalism, and the modern state, his early Marxism, and the complex influences of Marxist ideas on his thought. A central idea is that MacIntyre's political and social theory is a form of revolutionary--not reactionary--Aristotelianism. The contributors aim, in varying degrees, both to engage with the theoretical issues of MacIntyre's critique and to extend and deepen his insights. The book features a new introductory essay by MacIntyre, "How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary," and ends with an essay in which MacIntyre comments on the other authors' contributions. It also includes Kelvin Knight's 1996 essay, "Revolutionary Aristotelianism," which first challenged conservative appropriations of MacIntyre's critique of liberalism by reinterpreting his Aristotelianism through the lens of his earlier engagement with Marx. "This is an excellent collection. Its particular strength is its sustained focus on Alasdair MacIntyre's political thought, in particular MacIntyre's complicated relation and indebtedness to Marxism. In their introduction, the co-editors say that the reception of MacIntyre within political philosophy has largely been reductive and one-sided, namely, that he is simply viewed as a conservative communitarian. In focusing on MacIntyre's radical heritage, this volume helps correct that simplistic misperception." --Keith Breen, Queen's University Belfast

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
Total Pages: 210
Release: 1994-05-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0268160562

Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.

Reason and Morality

Reason and Morality
Author: Alan Gewirth
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 1978
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0226288765

"Most modern philosophers attempt to solve the problem of morality from within the epistemological assumptions that define the dominant cultural perspective of our age. Alan Gewirth's Reason and Morality is a major work in this ongoing enterprise. Gewirth develops, with patience and skill, what he calls a 'modified naturalism' in which morality is derived by logic alone from the concept of action. . . . I think that the publication of Reason and Morality is a major event in the history of moral philosophy. It develops with great power a new and exciting position in ethical naturalism. No one, regardless of philosophical stance, can read this work without an enlargement of mind. It illuminates morality and agency for all."—E. M. Adams, The Review of Metaphysics "This is a fascinating study of an apparently intractable problem. Gewirth has provided plenty of material for further discussion, and his theory deserves serious consideration. He is always aware of possible rejoinders and argues in a rigorous manner, showing a firm grasp of the current state of moral and political philosophy."—Mind

Dependent Rational Animals

Dependent Rational Animals
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: Open Court
Total Pages: 163
Release: 1999-08-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0812697057

"MacIntyre--one of the foremost ethicists of the past half-century--makes a sustained argument for the cetnrality, in well-lived human lives, of both virtue and local communities of giving and receiving. He criticizes the mainstream of Western ethics, including his own previous position, for not taking seriously the dependent and animal sides of human nature, thereby overemphasizing the powers of reason and the pursuit of reason and the pursuit of autonomy. . . . This important work in ethics is essential for the professional philosopher and is highly readable for students at all levels and for thoughtful citizens." --Choice