Books by Alasdair MacIntyre

Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.

Alasdair MacIntyre has written a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition, designed to show how belief in God informed and informs philosophical enquiry in different historical and social settings.

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the few professional philosophers whose writings span both technical analytical philosophy and those general moral or intellectual questions that laymen often suppose to be the province of philosophy. This book attempts to expose this dichotomy and to link beliefs and moral theories with philosophical criticism.

A Short History of Ethics is a significant contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. For the second edition Alasdair MacIntyre has included a new preface in which he examines his book "e;thirty years on"e; and considers its impact. It remains an important work, ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.

Three convictions underlie this book. The first is that an educated Catholic laity needs to understand a good deal more about Catholic philosophical thought than it does now. The warring partisans on the great issues that engage our culture and politics presuppose the truth of some philosophical theses and the falsity of others. Second, argues MacIntyre, Catholic philosophy is best understood historically, as a continuing conversation through the centuries, in which we turn and return to the most important voices from our past. Third, philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied but of philosophers in particular cultural and social situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumentative wrangling. This is the context for a book of vital importance and interest for anyone involved with education in a religious context. But from someone with MacIntyre's authority and reputation, the reader can expect something extremely perceptive about the role of religion in modern culture and society as a whole. The reader will not be disappointed.

Offers a persuasive argument of there not being rationality that is not the rationality of some tradition. MacIntyre examines the problems presented by the existence of rival traditions of inquiry in the cases of four major philosophers: Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hume.

MacIntyre's project, here as elsewhere, is to put up a fight against philosophical relativism. . . . The current form is the 'incommensurability,' so-called, of differing standpoints or conceptual schemes. Mr. MacIntyre claims that different schools of philosophy must differ fundamentally about what counts as a rational way to settle intellectual differences. Reading between the lines, one can see that he has in mind nationalities as well as thinkers, and literary criticism as well as academic philosophy. More explicitly, he labels and discusses three significantly different standpoints: the encyclopedic, the genealogical and the traditional. . . . [T]he chapters on the development of Christian philosophy between Augustine and Duns Scotus are very interesting indeed. . . . [MacIntyre] must be the past, present, future, and all-time philosophical historians' historian of philosophy. -The New York Times Book Review

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.

Edith Stein was an intellectual of considerable importance in the period between the two World Wars. This is a study of Stein's development as a theologian and philosopher, which reveals many of the fundamental issues in both disciplines and in their cross-fertilisation.

When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Newsweek called it "e;a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world."e; Since that time, the book has been translated into more than fifteen foreign languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies. Now, twenty-five years later, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, which includes a new prologue "e;After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century."e; In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. In the Third Edition prologue, MacIntyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has "e;as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions"e; of this book. While he recognizes that his conception of human beings as virtuous or vicious needed not only a metaphysical but also a biological grounding, ultimately he remains "e;committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity."e;

What is right? What is wrong? How do we decide? To a remarkable extent, our decision-making is determined by the origins of the ethical ideas that we employ and the history of their development. This title presents an insightful history of moral philosophy in the West, from the Greeks to contemporary times.