Alasdair MacIntyre

(1929 - 2025)

Richard Rorty argues that the present state of analytic philosophy is the result of the collapse of the logical empiricist program. But most of the characteristics of analytic philosophy which Rorty ascribes to that collapse predated logical empiricism. The historical explanation of the present state of philosophy must begin not later than with the schism between philosophy and the other disciplines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin then leads to a different view of how philosophical problems are generated.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HOW CAN WE LEARN WHAT VER/TATIS SPLENDOR HAS TO TEACH? ALASDAIR MAclNTYRE University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana V-ERITATIS SPLENDOR can be read in two very different ways. It can be read, and of course it should be ad, as a papal encyclical, a piece of authoritative Christian teaching. As such, it is addressed to the Catholic bishops and its subject-matter is not only Christian moral teaching in general, but more particularly the present condition of the academic discipline of moral theology. I of course am neither a bishop nor a theologian, so it might seem that all that I can be asked to do in reading Veritatis Splendor is to listen quietly to what is being said in a conversation between others. Yet the complexity of the experience of reading Veritatis Splendor makes it impossible for me to restrict myself to this role of a more or less innocent bystander. For Veritatis Splendor is not only a work of authoritative Christian teaching about moral judgment and the moral life, it is also a striking contribution by the Polish phenomenological and Thomistic philosopher, Karol Wojtyla, to ongoing philosophical enquiry, one in which an incisive account is advanced of the relationship between biblical and other Christian teaching, the various moralities of the various cultures of humankind and the argumentative conclusions of moral philosophers. (I am well aware that generally several anonymous writers contribute to the drafting of encyclicals, and doubtless they did so on this occasion. But any reader of Karol Wojtyla's major philosophical writings, from his doctoral dissertation onwards, will recognize, both in the style of arguments and in the nuances with which particular arguments are developed, a single nameable authorial 171 172 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE presence in this text.) The central theses of this encyclical thereby challenge a range of rival philosophical accounts of that relationship : Kantian, utilitarian, and Kierkegaardian, to name only the most important. But how can any one text perform both of these very different tasks? Insofar as V eritatis Splendor genuinely contributes to argumentative moral philosophy, must it not be precluded from presenting itself as authoritative teaching? And insofar as it is authoritative Christian teaching, how can it possibly be a contribution to the contentious debates of moral philosophy? Part of what is impressive about Veritatis Splendor is that in the course of answering a number of other questions, it also answers these questions about itself. Even so, any philosophical discussion of this encyclical which finds its argumentative conclusions compelling will be committed to an acknowledgment that philosophy itself, what it is and what it can legitimately hope to achieve, has to be understood in the light afforded by the Christian gospel. Veritatis Splendor never lets us forget this, so that even if I begin from the philosophy in the encyclical, I do so already knowing that it is going to direct me beyond philosophy. Nonetheless this is where I do have to begin, and this for two reasons. First of all this encyclical has an important argumentative structure and arguments are always matter for philosophy. Secondly, quite apart from any concern with Veritatis Splendor itself, what is inescapable for moral philosophers who are also Catholics, such as myself, is a strongly felt need for some definitive answer to the question of how their own peculiar philosophical conclusions about the nature of moral judgment and the moral life are related both to the dominant moral theories and practices of their own culture and to the biblical and Christian teaching by which they have been instructed. Each of these three presses upon us its own type of claim to our attention and allegiance and these sometimes conflicting claims define the situation in which and formed by which each of us encounters the theses and arguments of Veritatis Splendor. What then is my particular situation in these three respects, as Thomistic Aristotelian, as North American immigrant, and as Catholic? VERITATIS SPLENDOR 173 Thomists do of course quarrel a good deal among themselves. But there are two distinctive sets of conclusions which many of us take to be of crucial importance in the practical life. What are they? A first set concerns those rules...

Professor Macpherson is perhaps the most important living heir of John Stuart Mill and more especially of that in Mill which in the latter part of his life led him to become a socialist. Macpherson's polemics against liberalism's inheritance from possessive individualism make him the opponent of some of Mill's substantive positions and of even more of his formulations. But if we represent Macpherson as trying to rescue from Mill that which derives from his “concept of the power of a man as his ability to use and develop his uniquely human capacities” from that which derives from his “concept of a man's power as his ability to command the services of others” we shall do him no injustice. If he disagrees with Mill and Berlin in his rejection of any purely negative concept of liberty, he agrees with them in rejecting what he calls the “Idealist or metaphysical rationalist” view of positive liberty with its “great, disciplined, authoritarian structures”.

How should we respond when some of our basic beliefs are put into question? What makes a human body distinctively human? Why is truth an important good? These are among the questions explored in this 2006 collection of essays by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most creative and influential philosophers working today. Ten of MacIntyre's most influential essays written over almost thirty years are collected together here for the first time. They range over such topics as the issues raised by different types of relativism, what it is about human beings that cannot be understood by the natural sciences, the relationship between the ends of life and the ends of philosophical writing, and the relationship of moral philosophy to contemporary social practice. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology.

‘Applied ethics’, as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. Such rubrics function partly as a protective device both within the academic community and outside it; a name of this kind suggests not just a discipline, but a particular type of discipline. In the case of ‘applied ethics’ the suggestive power of the name derives from a particular conception of the relationship of ethics to what goes on under the rubric of ‘applied ethics’. Not everyone who conducts activities under that rubric owes allegiance to this conception and there are doubtless some who would repudiate it as strongly as I do. But it is that dominant conception from which most work in this area derives or aspires to derive its philosophical legitimacy. What is that conception?