Alasdair MacIntyre

>>9771317
A Short History Of Ethics: A History Of Moral Philosophy From The Homeric Age To The Twentieth Century?

>>9771363
Hmm, well, I dunno. Care to rephrase your question?

scott siskind reviewed this a while back

> As far as I can tell, MacIntyre’s central argument works something like this:
> 1. There are many theories of ethics in existence today
> 2. The ones that came after Aristotelianism have failed to objectively ground themselves and create a perfect society in which everyone agrees on a foundation for morality
> 4. Therefore, we should return to Aristotelianism
> You may notice a hole where one might place a Step 3, something like “Aristotelianism, in contrast, did objectively ground itself and create a perfect society in which everyone agreed on a foundation for morality.” This is exactly the argument MacIntyre digresses into a lengthy explanation of how much he likes Greek tragedy to hope we will avoid noticing him not making.
..
> The strongest defense I could give of MacIntyre is that he is doing something like this – he’s saying that if we can’t objectively ground one moral tradition, we might as well make sure we’re all operating inside the same moral tradition so we can talk to each other. I agree and think this is important. I just have no clue where he goes off on saying that this tradition should be virtue ethics, or that this ever worked in the past.

>>9771317
You can understand the book by itself.

>>9771317
It's self explanatory. Most people would be unfamiliar with Aristotle (aside surface level reading) and it was instrumental in bringing him back into both ethics and metaphysics.
It's a tetralogy, so each element of After Virtue is expanded on greatly in the following three works, Whose Justice Which Rationality, Three Versions of Moral Inquiry and Why Humans need Virtue.

Nobody will remember macintyre.
Nobody will remember Shishek
Nobody will remember Chompsky
Nobody will remember Nick Land.

>>9771666
How does MacIntyre even end up in that group?
And the memory of him will most probably live for as long as there are Catholics.

People will remember MacIntyre
People will remember Zizek
People will perhaps remember Chomsky if only for his work on linguistics
People will only increase their interest in Nick Land

>>9771382
There is a conceptual leap that has to be made before one can understand virtue ethics as a whole. This reviewer has clearly not made that conceptual leap otherwise he would understand that there are arguments made within the book for virtue ethics as a whole (though not necessarily Aristotelianism). I'm also a little confused because all you have to do is to read the very first chapter to see that his summary is wrong because he starts out by attacking emotivism and moral nihilism first. He literally attacks the belief systems that believe morality cannot be grounded yet the reviewer outright states that MacIntrye's idea is that if things cannot be grounded then virtue ethics is true.
Also this person doesn't even understand what the purpose of the book is. It's part of a series. This first book is merely a quick introduction of the main reasons he thinks the other two main branches of normative ethics and things like emotivism fail and a quick overview of how virtue ethics is different. This isn't some tractatus that sets for a step by step proofed theory of everything.

>>9771383
Sort of. The book as I said above isn't a tractatus or anything similar. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with it but MacIntyre is notorious for relying on ideas and arguments from his published papers without telling the audience. He actually expects the reader to be so familiar with his work that he doesn't even need to say when he is using it's material.
This usually manifests itself in the form of him saying something and either never elaborating on how it actually relates to the topic at hand, saying something without explaining very well what it actually is, or explaining something without any attempt to ground it.
For these reasons I would expect someone to be reasonably aware of the history of philosophy to make proper use of the book.

Thanks!

1. Which writings of Aristotle would be useful to read before? Nicomachean Ethics?
2. What does the author think about Christianity?

>>9773235
Ethics, Metaphysics, Categories, Politics.
MacIntyre became a Catholic shortly before writing this (or was it after), but at the time did not yet draw upon thomism nearly as much. His later work is pure thomism with sprinkled marxist critique of capitalism. You can find some of his great lectures on YouTube.