About the Author

Alasdair MacIntyre is research professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of numerous books, including After Virtue, A Short History of Ethics, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Reviews

"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. . . . [T]hese chapters surely show that he must be the past, present, future and all-time philosophical historians' historian of philosophy. —The New York Times Book Review

"This book deepens and defends MacIntyre's claim that genuinely rational enquiry requires membership in a particular type of moral community. He offers the most persuasive recent restatement of the Thomist position on the relation of metaphysics to morality." —Richard Rorty

"Highly recommended." —Library Journal

"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. . . . [T]hese chapters surely show that he must be the past, present, future and all-time philosophical historians' historian of philosophy. -The New York Times Book Review

"This book deepens and defends MacIntyre's claim that genuinely rational enquiry requires membership in a particular type of moral community. He offers the most persuasive recent restatement of the Thomist position on the relation of metaphysics to morality." -Richard Rorty

"Highly recommended." -Library Journal