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131A Short History of Ethics has over the past thirty years become a key philosophical contribution to studies on morality and ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre writes a new preface for this second edition which looks at the book 'thirty years on' and considers its impact. A Short History of Ethics guides the reader through the history of moral philosophy from the Greeks to contemporary times. MacIntyre emphasises the importance of a historical context to moral concepts and ideas showing the relevance of …Read more
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129Interview - Alasdair MacIntyreThe Philosophers' Magazine 40 (40): 47-48. 2008.Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal book After Virtue was central in the rehabilitation of the Aristotelian approach to ethics. His work in moral and political philosophy is among the most important of his generation, and is influenced by Marx, Aquinas, Aristotle, and conversion to Roman Catholicism. He is a permanent senior research fellow at the University of Notre Dame.
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129Critical Remarks on The Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1): 187-190. 1994.
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127What Morality Is NotPhilosophy 32 (123). 1957.The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances. In this paper I am concerned to propound an entirely negative thesis about these characteristics. It is widely held that it is of the essence of moral valuations that they are universalisable and prescriptive. This is the contention which I wish to deny. I shall proceed by first examining the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and es…Read more
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115Ends and EndingsAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 88 (4): 807-821. 2014.The question posed in this paper is: Is there an end to some type of activity which is the end of any rational agent? It approaches an answer by a critical examination of one view of human beings that excludes this possibility, that advanced by Harry Frankfurt. It is argued that once we have distinguished, as Frankfurt does not, that which we have good reason to care about from that which we do not have good reason to care about, we are able to identify a conception of a final end for human acti…Read more
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113The very idea of a university: Aristotle, Newman, and usBritish Journal of Educational Studies 57 (4): 347-362. 2009.No abstract
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112Review of G.e.M. Anscombe, Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (10). 2008.
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103The intelligibility of actionIn Joseph Margolis, Michael Krausz & Richard M. Burian (eds.), Rationality, Relativism, and the Human Sciences, M. Nijhoff. pp. 63--80. 1986.
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102Hard Truths, Soft Lies, Solitary Thoughts (review)Analysis 71 (2): 333-341. 2011.Hard Truths is an important book in its own right. It is also the latest contribution to a complex and impressive project that Elijah Milligram has been developing from his first book onwards. There he characterized practical induction as a type of reasoning that enables agents to learn from experiences of the new and the unfamiliar, agents whose inferences are from beliefs that they have formed either ‘in ways that have a suitable amount to do with [their] truth’, or, when ‘the appeal to truth …Read more
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98The Savage MindPhilosophical Quarterly 17 (69): 372. 1967."Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human …Read more
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95How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary: Ethics, Resistance, and UtopiaPhilosophy of Management 7 (1): 3-7. 2008.
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86What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying ItAnalyse & Kritik 30 (1): 261-281. 2008.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 unde…Read more
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83Philosophical Education Against Contemporary CultureProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 87 43-56. 2013.Four stages in an adequate philosophical education are distinguished. The first is that in which students learn to put in question some commonly shared assumptions about what happiness is and to ask what the good of engaging in this kind of questioning is. The second is a conceptual and linguistic analysis of “good” which enables questions about what human goods are to be formulated. The third is an investigation into the nature and unity of human beings designed to enable us to propose rational…Read more
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78Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and NarrativeCambridge University Press. 2016.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…Read more
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73Individual and social morality in japan and the united states: Rival conceptions of the selfPhilosophy East and West 40 (4): 489-497. 1990.
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67What Can Moral Philosophers Learn from the Study of the Brain?The Engine of Reason, the Seat of Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (4): 865-869. 1998.
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62Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1): 95-99. 1997.
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58The Unconscious: A Conceptual AnalysisRoutledge. 1976.This edition includes a substantial new preface by the author, in which he discusses repression, determinism, transference, and practical rationality, and offers a comparison of Aristotle and Lacan on the concept of desire. MacIntyre takes the opportunity to reflect both on the reviews and criticisms of the first edition and also on his own philosophical stance
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55My Station and Its VirtuesJournal of Philosophical Research 19 1-8. 1994.This paper compares the central theses of Edmund M. Pincoffs’s Quandaries and Virtues with those of F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies. Both Pincoffs and Bradley understand virtues and duties as functional in respect of the common good of the social order. Both reject the individualism of Kantian and utilitarian theories. Both believe that ordinary moral agents do not appeal to and do not need to appeal to the kinds of justification for action defended by such theories. It is argued that the import…Read more
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