Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue PDF

Author: Christopher Stephen Lutz

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-04-05

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1441176632

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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 PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1623569818

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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 PDF

Author: Christopher Stephen Lutz

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-03-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1441145079

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

The MacIntyre Reader

The MacIntyre Reader PDF

Author: Kelvin Knight

Publisher: Polity

Published: 1998-10-23

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 9780745619750

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-11-14

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1316820246

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

After Virtue

After Virtue PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2013-10-21

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1623565251

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue

Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue PDF

Author: Thomas D. D'Andrea

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-29

Total Pages: 504

ISBN-13: 1351878301

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre

Kierkegaard After MacIntyre PDF

Author: John J. Davenport

Publisher: Open Court

Published: 2015-11-02

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0812699319

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry PDF

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 1994-05-12

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0268160562

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

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.

Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge

Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge PDF

Author: R. Scott Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 135187568X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms, and we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his much-heralded restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein's views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics.