V. Dana

This paper seeks to evaluate the political dimensions to Alasdair MacIntyre's thought. It does so by examining his virtue ethics in light of the political vision set out in Dependent Rational Animals and elsewhere. Key to MacIntyre's project is a form of local community that challenges the modern market and nation-state. This challenge and its philosophical underpinnings situate him as a distinctive figure within contemporary democratic thought. Against his critics, a central claim is that MacIntyre does not fall foul either of a nostalgic anti-pluralism or an unreflective conservatism. In fact, his theory is amenable to the idea of a non-subjectivist pluralism and displays a highly sophisticated understanding of the processes of change and critique. There are, however, significant problems. These spring from MacIntyre's excessive hostility to modern liberal realities. A near totalising critique, it threatens not only to undercut his Aristotelian philosophy of practice, but also leads him to an insupportable bifurcation of state and community. As regards the state, civil liberty, and distributive justice, MacIntyre can avoid self-contradiction and a despairing purism only if he takes a more moderate stance.

This study examined associations between level of sport participation, goal and sportspersonship orientations, and moral reasoning in sport and nonsport situations and orientation by sport participation interactions. Participants were individuals with elite, high school, and youth sport participation. When judging sport situations, individuals who participated in elite sports demonstrated poorer moral reasoning than those who participated in high school and youth sports. At low levels of sportspersonship, individuals who participated in youth sports demonstrated higher moral reasoning than those who participated in high school and elite sports. When judging nonsport situations, moral reasoning was positively related to positive sportspersonship and negatively related to ego orientation but did not differ by sport participation. Within sport, sport participation and goal and sportspersonship orientations play a critical role in moral reasoning. However, these orientations may be more important than sport participation in moral reasoning beyond the sport context.

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and an intersubjective world, common to us all (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This role-taking success identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of role-taking failure (Rosenberg, 1992).The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top..

This essay takes a critical look at the rubric “age of terror,” a rubric which has enjoyed a certain amount of theoretical and philosophical cachet in recent years. My argument begins by noting the continuity between this hypostatization and contemporary “war on terror” rhetoric, a continuity that is, in certain respects, ironic given the politics of the “age of terror” theorists. It then moves—via Machiavelli, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt—to a consideration of the topics of state violence (on the one hand) and totalitarian terror (on the other). I use Arendt’s theorization of totalitarian terror for a dual purpose: first, to emphasize the gap between totalitarian terror and the more familiar “terror as means”; second, to question the characterization of recent Islamic terrorism as totalitarian in essence. Arendt’s distinctions between violence, terror and totalitarian terror help us avoid the Schmittian logic installed by advocates of the “war on terror” and by a variety of writers anxious to identify a ill-defined and generic “totalitarianism” as the transhistorical and transcultural “other” of liberalism. Keywords : terror; islamic terrorism; Hannah Arendt; Max Weber; totalitarianism; “Age of Terror”; liberalism; Machiavelli; evil as policy (Published online: 25 August, 2008) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics 2008. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v1i3.1861.