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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.
MacIntyre explores the philosophical, political, and moral issues encountered in understanding what the virtues require in contemporary social contexts.
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 tw...
This is the first full-length account of MacIntyre's work for the social sciences. His work is shown to provide the resources for a powerful critique of liberalism and as the inspiration for a critical social science of Modernity.
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.
"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
This selection of Alasdair MacIntyrea (TM)s early writings on Marxism and ethics aims both to fill a gap in the academic literature on MacIntyrea (TM)s ethical theory, and to offer a contribution to more recent debates on the ethics of revolution.
In Dependent Rational Animals, Alasdair MacIntyre compares humans to other intelligent animals, ultimately drawing remarkable conclusions about human social life and our treatment of those whom he argues we should no longer call "disabled." MacIntyre argues that human beings are independent, practical reasoners, but they are also dependent animals who must learn from each other in order to remain largely independent. To flourish, humans must acknowledge the importance of dependence and independence, both of which are developed in and through social relationships. This requires the development of a local community in which individuals discover their own "goods" through the discovery of a common Good.