Background
MacIntyre, Alasdair was born on January 12, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. Came to United States, 1969. Son of Eneas John and Margaret Emily (Chalmers) MacI.
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This volume explores the common ground between Marxism and Christianity. It argues that Marxism shares in good measure both the content and functions of Christianity and does so because it inherits it from Christianity. It details the religious attitudes and modes of belief that appear in Marxism as it developed historically from the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach, and as it has been carried on by its latter-day interpreters from Rosa Luxemberg and Trotsky to Kautsky and Lukacs. It sets out to show that Marxism, no less than Christianity, is subject to the historical relativity that affects all ideologies. This new edition has been updated to take account of the collapse of Communism in the former Eastern bloc and whether Marxism, in particular, is still relevant to those who seek a changed social order today.
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( What is right ? What is wrong ? How do we decide ? To a...)
What is right ? What is wrong ? How do we decide ? To a remarkable extent, our decision-making is determined by the origins of the ethical ideas that we employ and the history of their development. A Short History of Ethics is widely acknowledged to be the perfect introduction to the subject, presenting in concise form an insightful yet exceptionally complete history of moral philosophy in the West, from the Greeks to contemporary times. In clear and readable prose, Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the finest living philosophers, leads the reader towards a greater understanding of what lies behind our ethical decisions.
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(Condensada y selectiva, esta historia de la filosofÃa mo...)
Condensada y selectiva, esta historia de la filosofÃa moral permite al lector situar los textos de ética en una perspectiva histórica, desde la generación homérica hasta los debates anglosajones contemporáneos.De este modo, el libro se ocupa de la mayorÃa de tipos y escuelas de la ética occidental: de los sofistas, de Sócra
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(A Short History of Ethics is a history of moral philosoph...)
A Short History of Ethics is a history of moral philosophy from the Greeks to the present day. It enables the reader to place specific texts in moral philosophy in a historical perspective by showing the debt moral philosophers owe to their predecessors and the historical development of changes in the moral concepts.
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(Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981,...)
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.
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(What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide? To a rema...)
What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide? To a remarkable extent, our decision-making is determined by the origins of the ethical ideas that we employ and the history of their development. This title presents an insightful history of moral philosophy in the West, from the Greeks to contemporary times.
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MacIntyre, Alasdair was born on January 12, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. Came to United States, 1969. Son of Eneas John and Margaret Emily (Chalmers) MacI.
Bachelor, Queen Mary College, University London, 1949. Master of Arts, Manchester University, 1951. Master of Arts, Oxford University, 1961.
Doctor of Hebrew Literature (honorary), Swarthmore College, 1983. Doctor of Letters (honorary), Queen's University, Belfast, Ireland, 1968. D.O.E. (honorary), Essex University, England.
Lecturer Manchester (England) University, 1951-1957, Leeds (England) University, 1957-1961. Research fellow Nuffield College Oxford (England) University, 1961-1962. Senior fellow Council Humanities, Princeton, 1962-1963.
Fellow University College, Oxford University, 1963-1966. D.U.E. (honorary) University Essex, England, 1966-1969. Professor history of ideas Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, 1969-1972.
Dean College Liberal Arts, Boston University, 1972-1973, professor philosophy and political science, 1972-1980. Henry Luce professor Wellesley (Massachusetts) College, 1980-1982. W. Alton Jones professor Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 1982-1988.
Henry Luce scholar Whitney Humanities Center Yale University, 1988-1989. McMahon/Hank professor University Notre Dame, Indiana, Indiana, 1988-1994. Professor arts & science Duke University, Durham, 1995—2000.
Research professor University Notre Dame, since 2000. Riddell lecturer University Newcastle on Tyne, England, 1964, Bampton lecturer Columbia University, 1966, Gifford lecturer University Edinburgh, 1988.
(Alasdair MacIntyre--whom Newsweek has called "one of the ...)
(Condensada y selectiva, esta historia de la filosofÃa mo...)
( What is right ? What is wrong ? How do we decide ? To a...)
(What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide? To a rema...)
(Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981,...)
( When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recogn...)
(Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry : Encyclopaedia, Ge...)
(A Short History of Ethics is a history of moral philosoph...)
(After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition [Pap...)
( This volume explores the common ground between Marxism ...)
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(Philosophy book.)
MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dahl, Norman O. Baier, Annette and Schneewind, J. B. (1991) ‘Book symposium'on Whose Justice? Which Rationality?,,n Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11: 149-78.
MacIntyre’s first book, written when he was 23, tried to rescue both a purified Christianity and a Purified Marxism for the modem world. He argued that, properly understood, Marxism, as the historical successor to Christianity, largely shares both its content and its function as an •nterpretation of human existence.
In 1955 New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 'vhich MacIntyre edited with Antony Flew, and which gathered together a number of essays aPplying the methods of conceptual analysis to specific religious issues, reinaugurated the serious study of the philosophy of religion, a subject vvhich had been moribund in the analytical tradition for some decades.
Since the mid-1960s most of MacIntyre’s work uas been concerned with ethical and social theory.
In A Short History of Ethics (1966) he attacked he notion that moral concepts are a timeless.
unchanging, determinate set.
He held rather that they are embodied in, and partially constitutive of, forms of social life, and so change as social life changes. This does not mean merely that different societies have held different things to be right or good but, much more radically, that what it means to describe something as right or good may itself change. Indeed, the very idea of morality is subject to change.
So, to take one central case, the peculiarly moral, Kantian sense of ‘ought’ that characterizes much modern ethical thought—an ‘ought’ that expresses obligations binding on all rational beings as such, but unable to be derived logically from any factual statements—is completely absent in, for instance, the Homeric period. It arose, according to MacIntyre, in the modern period when the social roles and ideals that had originally provided a backing for it gradually dropped away. And this development explains the peculiarly intractable nature of moral disputes in the modem world, which is not a feature of all possible moralities but of one with a certain history.
MacIntyre developed in detail this diagnosis of the problems of modern morality in After Virtue (1981).
Its central claim is that modern morality is in deep disarray. It is, he suggested, no more than the fragments of a conceptual scheme which has lost the context which once made it intelligible, and to which have been added, as a way of attempting to cope with the breakdown of the traditional moral philosophy, such moral fictions as natural rights and utility. The attempt is a failure since, for one thing, there are no such things as natural rights or utility.
And, for another, this yoking of incompatible moral traditions has largely made of morality just what Nietzsche and various forms of emotivism have claimed that it is: the mere expression of subjective preference with no objective criteria for deciding between them.
If morality is again to make sense for us, we must, according to MacIntyre, recapture something of the Aristotelian tradition of moral philosophy. Further, given the nature of our society and its ruling liberal individualist ideas, this will not be easy. It would entail recapturing a number of ideas that are now lost.
The concept of what MacIntyre calls a practice—a cooperative enterprise in pursuit of goods internal to that enterprise—would be essential. This, outside of the area of games, and particularly in our participation in political life, we have all but lost. So too we should need to recapture the notion of a whole human life, an idea lost to us now because bureaucratic modernity has seen to it that our lives have no unity.
And, third, we should need to recapture the sense that what we arc is largely a matter of what we have become through our history and traditions. Without these notions, morality can make little sense for us. The choice, as MacIntyre puts it, is between Nietzsche and Aristotle.
Given this analysis, a central problem is how rationally to recommend one tradition of thought as against another.
MacIntyre turned to this issue in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and in his Gifford Lectures. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). The accounts of justice that we find in Aristotle and Hume—to take what are for us two of the most central examples are, according to MacIntyre, embedded in overall systems of thought which respectively impose their own standards of rationality on them.
That being so, how may we adjudicate between them? MacIntyre argues that there can be no such thing as a rational enquiry which docs not adopt the standpoint of a particular tradition. This, however, need not involve any form of relativism, since the tradition from which one reasons may itself involve an absolute conception of truth. So it is with the Thomist tradition that MacIntyre recommends in these works.
And it can show itself rationally superior to both the Nietzschean tradition and the tradition of post-Enlightenment ethics that we have inherited. It can solve problems that these traditions themselves must recognize to be problems, and explain why they themselves cannot do so. If the state of modernity is characterized by lack of agreement about even the most fundamental questions, what role does this leave for the university? In ‘The idea of an educated public' (1987), MacIntyre argued that the dual aim of the liberal university—to prepare students for a social role and to teach them to think for themselves—could no longer be achieved: the demise of the ‘educated public’, a self-conscious body of people with a common intellectual inheritance and shared standards of argument, has made it impossible.
In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry he envisages the university ‘as a place of constrained disagreement, of imposed participation in conflict, in which a central responsibility of higher education would be to initiate students into conflict’. MacIntyre’s work has been widely influential. Some, however, have questioned his historical interpretation.
And many have not found modern moral thought to be in such comparative disarray as he suggests.
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences, British Academy (correspondent). Member Royal Irish Academy.