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This vital collection showcases the trajectory of MacIntyre’s thought and the perennial significance of his work.
One of the world’s foremost philosophers for over half a century, Alasdair MacIntyre stands at the forefront of the revival of Aristotelianism in contemporary thought. Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy serves as an accessible introduction to MacIntyre’s work while also providing a clear sense of how he continued to develop and refine his philosophy after the publication of After Virtue. This essential reader includes some of his most important works on ethics and politics, including unpublished pieces from his Common Goods and Political Reasoning project.
Focusing on the period between After Virtue and MacIntyre’s final masterpiece, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, the collection shows how he came to understand Aristotelianism not merely as a rival to consequentialist and deontological ethical theories, but as a distinctive account of ethical inquiry, one that can illuminate both the sources of our contemporary moral disputes and the conditions under which true moral progress can be made. Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy also reveals how MacIntyre found vital resources for understanding and criticizing the irrationalities and injustices of contemporary society and politics in the Aristotelian tradition.
“On his passing, Alasdair MacIntyre was honored from diverse perspectives for having reinvigorated moral philosophy in our time. This beautifully curated collection of his statements across a lifetime is a kind of testament to just how profound and wide-ranging he was. The book introduces and reintroduces his thought to an intellectual world that still needs it.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Liberalism against Itself
Kelvin Knight is a reader in ethics and politics at London Metropolitan University, where he was the director of the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics from 2009 to 2020. He is the author of Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre.
Peter Wicks is a scholar-in-residence at the Elm Institute and a lecturer at Yale University.
Introduction
Part 1. Rethinking a Tradition of Practical Rationality
1. Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods
2. Does Applied Ethics Rest on a Mistake?
3. Are Philosophical Problems Insoluble? The Relevance of System and History
4. The Idea of an Educated Public
5. Interview with Dmitri Nikulin
6. The Recovery of Moral Agency?
7. Conflicts of Desire
8. Interview with Alex Voorhoeve
9. Danish Ethical Demands and French Common Goods: Two Moral Philosophies
10. On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the Twentieth Century
Part 2. Challenging Contemporary Politics
11. Breaking the Chains of Reason
12. The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken
13. Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good
14. How Aristotelianism Can Become Revolutionary
15. The Irrelevance of Ethics
16. Four–or More?–Political Aristotles
17. Two Kinds of Political Reasoning
18. Happiness
19. Political Rhetoric in a Fractured Society
20. Common Goods, Modern States, Rights, and—Maritain
21. Practical Rationality and Irrationality and their Social Settings
Index