Alasdair MacIntyre

1929-present · Scottish-American · Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Moral Theology

This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.

Born in Glasgow in 1929, Alasdair MacIntyre began his intellectual life as a Marxist, editing journals alongside E. P. Thompson in the British New Left. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 forced the central question of his career: on what rational basis could one condemn Stalinism? Neither liberal individualism nor existentialism could answer it. The search drove him through the philosophy of social science and eventually to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Catholicism.

Topics Alasdair MacIntyre addresses

• emotivism as cultural condition
• the failure of the Enlightenment project
• practice (in MacIntyre's technical sense)
• internal vs external goods
• the narrative unity of a human life
• tradition-constituted rationality
• Nietzsche or Aristotle?
• virtue as acquired human quality
• the dependent rational animal
• the new dark ages and waiting for another St. Benedict
• the encyclopaedia/genealogy/tradition trichotomy
• the disquieting suggestion
• the virtues in heroic societies
• the virtues at Athens
• justice as a virtue
• the nature of the virtues
• the unity of a human life and the concept of a tradition
• medieval aspects and occasions
• from the virtues to virtue and after virtue
• liberalism and the politics of community
• the manager, the therapist, and the aesthete
• action versus behavior
• MacIntyre and Marxism
• moral fragments and incommensurability

Converse with Alasdair MacIntyre on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.