. It includes extracts from and his own synopses of two famous books from the 1980s, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? as well as the whole of several shorter works and two interviews. It is this tradition, he claims, morality, which presents the best theory so far about the nature of rationality, and politics.
Together, these pieces constitute not only a representative collection of his work but also the most powerful and accessible presentation of his arguments yet available. The macintyre reader concludes with Kelvin Knight's clear and insightful overview of MacIntyre's central ideas and their development in his writings.
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After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition
Now, the university of notre dame press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, twenty-five years later, which includes a new prologue “After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century. In this classic work, alasdair macintyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery.
While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. While he recognizes that his conception of human beings as virtuous or vicious needed not only a metaphysical but also a biological grounding, ultimately he remains “committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity.
University of Notre Dame Press. In the third edition prologue, macintyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has “as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions” of this book.
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Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue
After virtue is a watershed in MacIntyre's career. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. It follows his emergence from Marxism, but draws on Marxist sources and arguments. 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. University of Notre Dame Press.
Moral Luck
A new volume of philosophical essays by Bernard Williams. That whole area has of course been strikingly reinvigorated over the last deacde, and philosophers have both broadened and deepened their concerns in a way that now makes much earlier moral and political philosophy look sterile and trivial. The work presented here is marked by a high degree of imagination and acuity, and also conveys a strong sense of psychological reality.
. The book is a successor to problems of the Self, but whereas that volume dealt mainly with questions of personal identity, Moral Luck centres on questions of moral philosophy and the theory of rational action. University of Notre Dame Press.
Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy
Bernard williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything. Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth: suspicion of being deceived no one wants to be fooled and skepticism that objective truth exists at all no one wants to be naive.
Williams's approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, history, blends philosophy, and a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. What does it mean to be truthful? what role does truth play in our lives? What do we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these questions than Bernard Williams.
Used book in Good Condition. Truth and truthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value guarantees itself. This tension between a demand for truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract paradox.
It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces. University of Notre Dame Press.
Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative
Cambridge University Press. 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. Used book in Good Condition. University of Notre Dame Press. He asks, further, informed by marx's insights, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity.
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Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. He believes that the ethical work of plato and Aristotle is nearer to the truth of what ethical life is, but at the same time recognizes that the modern world makes unparalleled demands on ethical thought. He accuses modern moral philosophers of retreating to system and deserting individuals in their current social context.
He deals with the most thorny questions in contemporary philosophy and offers new ideas about issues such as relativism, objectivity, and the possibility of ethical knowledge. Used book in Good Condition. Modern theories such as utilitarianism and contractualism usually offer criteria that lie outside the self altogether, together with an emphasis on system, and this, has weakened ethical thought.
In this book he delivers a sustained indictment of systematic moral theory from Kant onward and offers a persuasive alternative. Kant’s ideas involved a view of the self we can no longer accept.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
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Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition
The current form is the 'incommensurability, ' so-called, of differing standpoints or conceptual schemes. Macintyre must be the past, future, present, and all-time philosophical historians' historian of philosophy. The new york times book Review University of Notre Dame Press. More explicitly, he labels and discusses three significantly different standpoints: the encyclopedic, the genealogical and the traditional.
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Macintyre's project, here as elsewhere, is to put up a fight against philosophical relativism.
Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues The Paul Carus Lectures
Used book in Good Condition. Open Court. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Utilitarianism: For and Against
Cambridge University Press. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. In part ii bernard williams offers a sustained and vigorous critique of utilitarian assumptions, arguments and ideals. In the first part of the book professor smart advocates a modern and sophisticated version of classical utilitarianism; he tries to formulate a consistent and persuasive elaboration of the doctrine that the rightness and wrongness of actions is determined solely by their consequences, and in particular their consequences for the sum total of human happiness.
University of Notre Dame Press. This book should be of interest to welfare economists, political scientists and decision-theorists. Used book in Good Condition. Open Court.