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Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1344129

The present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1126525

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 568089

We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other's, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 318944

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 545450

The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1554184

Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality; or, at the very least, you will have radically transformed its character. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1571376

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder ... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have
very largely if not entirely
lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 317636

The medieval world then is one in which not only is the scheme of the virtues enlarged beyond an Aristotelian perspective, but above all in which the connection between the distinctively narrative element in human life and the character of the vices comes to the forefront of consciousness and not only in biblical terms. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 509104

We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 329073

Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1751881

Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1836270

Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1876125

The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1321523

There is no chain of philosophical reasoning or method of philosophical enquiry through which we can arrive at the truths of faith as conclusions. But once by faith we have acknowledged those truths we are able to understand why there is good reason to acknowledge them. This, as he was to argue a little later, is because of the effects of sin on the human mind. It is "because human minds are obscured by familiarity with darkness, which covers them in a night of sins and bad habits, and are unable to perceive with the clarity and purity proper to reason" that authority has been provided to bring "the faltering eye into the light of truth" (De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 31.2.31). — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2264120

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 323691

The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 774172

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2110510

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves out to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming age of barbarism and darkness. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1526582

We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1625690

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1634914

Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1665121

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1317926

For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1703523

The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1737614

Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1737738

... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1521067

To be a philosopher is not of course necessarily to be in agreement with Aristotle. But it was increasingly an Aristotelian point of view that prevailed among Islamic philosophers and, when the greatest of the Islamic critics of philosophy, al-Ghazal!, attacks philosophers he identifies philosophy with Aristotelian philosophy. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1753060

History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1823776

At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1870698

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1886525

For by either eliminating mention of God from the curriculum altogether (departments of religious studies concern themselves with various types of belief in God, not with God), or by restricting reference to God to departments of theology, such universities render their secular curriculum Godless. And this Godlessness is, as I already noted, not just a matter of the subtraction of God from the range of objects studied, but also and quite as much the absence of any integrated and overall view of things. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1894807

To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1910861

The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1934509

Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1997060

It is yet another of Nietzsche's merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2013907

Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.
In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly). — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2061454

Would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul - does — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2153776

The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors' premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this. The — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2165948

J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the cause of the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra's nose: had her features not been perfectly proportioned, Mark Antony would not have been entranced; had he not been entranced he would not have allied himself with Egypt against Octavian; had he not made that alliance, the battle of Actium would not have been fought - and so on. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2204620

The characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2224122

If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 2225157

It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 615793

To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 157349

Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 313294

What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 324258

[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 331811

Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 349872

There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules ... intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory ... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? ... Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo? — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 386807

We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 485414

But the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 522256

Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would ... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 530685

I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 542453

I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 549841

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 555418

To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 560386

From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 570106

What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part? — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1467004

A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 773684

Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 792725

In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community's good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 793904

Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 813231

Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1). — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 937919

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 970365

Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1097412

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1098925

Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1166240

What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1199573

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1215882

At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 125010

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1403844

Raymond Aron ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable.' ... while [Weber] holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational ... — Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes 1426765

The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. — Alasdair MacIntyre