Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Author: Christopher Stephen Lutz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 297
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.

After Virtue

After Virtue
Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 352
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: A&C Black
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2012-03-15
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441145079

Concise guide to MacIntyre's most important book, After Virtue, examining its arguments in detail and placing it within the broader context of MacIntyre's career.

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.

The MacIntyre Reader

The MacIntyre Reader
Author: Kelvin Knight
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 312
Release: 1998-10-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9780745619750

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 work. It includes extracts from and synopses of two famous books from the 1980s, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, as well as the whole of several shorter works (one published for the first time in English) and two interviews. Taken together, these constitute not only a representative collection of his work but also the most powerful and accessible presentation of his arguments yet available. The Reader also includes a summary, by the editor, of the development of MacIntyre's central ideas, and an extensive guide to further reading. Students will find the book a useful guide to MacIntyre's case against both capitalist institutions and academic orthodoxies.

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.

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

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.

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre
Author: John J. Davenport
Publisher: Open Court
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2015-11-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0812699319

In his extraordinarily influential book on ethics, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre maintained that Kierkegaard's notion of "choosing" to interpret one's choices in ethical terms implies an arbitrary and irrational leap. MacIntyre's critique of Kierkegaard has become the focal point for several new interpretations of Kierkegaard that seek to answer MacIntyre. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre brings together both new and already published articles in this vein, with a new reply by Professor MacIntyre. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre reflects the emergence of a new consensus in Kierkegaard scholarship. This consensus is strongly anti-irrationalist and contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, clarifying their common ground as well as their differences. In responding to MacIntyre's 'irrationalist' objection, the authors clarify the sense in which Kierkegaard's own conception of freedom is teleological and suggest that his understanding of the development of ethical personality involves a quest for narrative unity, a commitment to practices involving social values, and a self-understanding conditioned by historical reality—all of which are also central themes in MacIntyre's work on virtue ethics. Despite MacIntyre's diagnosis of Kierkegaard's existential approach to ethics as unsuccessful, some of Kierkegaard's insights may support MacIntyre's own theses. "Kierkegaard After MacIntyre is an outstanding book which brings Kierkegaard into direct conversation with one of the most important contemporary philosophers. The conversation contains both lively disagreements and illuminating analyses, all focused on issues of fundamental importance for human life." —C. Stephen Evans, Calvin College ". . . this wonderfully edifying collection of essays." —Timothy P. Jackson, Emory University "In addressing MacIntyre's charge that for Kierkegaard the adoption of the ethical can only be a 'cirterionless choice,' this stimulating set of essays by well-known Kierkegaard scholars provides a welcome addition to the literature on Kierkegaardian ethics. Kierkegaard After MacIntyre provides a valuable exploration of the role of reasoning, will, and passion in moral life, as well as of the relation between aesthetic and ethical dimensions of life." —M. Jamie Ferreira, University of Virginia