Alasdair MacIntyre

(1929 - 2025)

Contending that Marxism achieved its unique position in part by adopting the content and functions of Christianity, MacIntyre details the religious attitudes and modes of belief that appear in Marxist doctrine as it developed historically from the philosophies of Hegel and Feuerbach, and as it has been carried on by latter-day interpreters from Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky to Kautsky and Lukacs. The result is a lucid exposition of Marxism and an incisive account of its persistence and continuing importance.

Concept and theory formation in the social sciences, by A. Schutz.--Is it a science? by S. Morgenbesser.--Knowledge and interest, by J. Habermas.--Sociological explanation, by T. Burns.--Methodological individualism reconsidered, by S. Lukes.--The problem of rationality in the social world, by A. Schutz.--Concepts and society, by E. Gellner.--Symbols in Ndembu ritual, by V. Turner.--Telstar and the Aborigines or La pensée sauvage, by E. Leach.--Groote Eylandt totemism and Le totémisme aujourd'hui, by P. Worsley.--Bibliography (p. 225-228)

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