Alasdair MacIntyre

(1929 - 2025)

The responses to my critics are as various as their criticisms, focusing successively on the distinctive character of modern moral disagreements, on the nature of common goods and their relationship to the virtues, on how the inequalities generated by advanced capitalist economies and by the contemporary state prevent the achievement of common goods, on issues concerning the nature of the self, on what it is that Marx’s theory enables us to understand and on how some Marxists have failed to understand, on the differences between my philosophical stances and those both of John McDowell and of the physicalists, on the nature of human rights and of productive work, on the ancient Greek polis, and on the metaphysical commitments presupposed by my theorizing.

During the mid-1950s, three books appeared which, while theologically unfashionable at the time, can now be seen to have pointed the way forward that theology had to take. New Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair Maclntyre, has been available ever since, and has been in increasing demand. Religious Language, by Ian T. Ramsey, now Bishop of Durham, was out of print in England for a while, but has been reissued and is in a second new impression. Metaphysical Beliefs, on the other hand, was never reprinted. It consists of three long essays, by Stephen Toulmin on 'Contemporary Scientific Mythology'; by Ronald Hepburn on 'Poetry and Religious Belief'; and by Alasdair Maclntyre on 'The Logical Status of Religious Belief'. When the book first appeared, The Times Literary Supplement commented: 'This volume should be widely read and discussed. It is philosophical thinking at a high level, because it faces live issues, avoids asperity towards opponents, and should provoke the right kind of controversy.' More than ten years later, the same verdict still holds true.

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. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.