Analyse & Kritik

Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory

Suchergebnisse

"Alasdair MacIntyre"

Titel: Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
Autor: Kelvin Knight
Seite: 317-329

Abstract: Social practices are widely regarded as the bedrock that turns one’s spade, beneath which no further justifications for action can be found. Followers of the later Wittgenstein might therefore be right to agree with Heideggerians and neo-pragmatists that philosophy’s traditional search for first principles should be abandoned. However, the concept of practices has played a very different role in the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. Having once helped lead the assault on foundationalism in both moral and social philosophy, his elaboration of an Aristotelian’ concept of practices in After Virtue has since led him to embrace a metaphysical teleology. This paper attempts to outline MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept, and to identify its ethical, political and philosophical significance.

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Titel: Homo Ökonomikus als Idealtypus. Oder: Das Dilemma des Don Juan
Autor: Michael Baurmann
Seite: 555-573

Abstract: Neither the model of homo oeconomicus nor Max Weber’s concept of the ideal type have a good reputation these days - to try to combine the two does not seem a promising idea, therefore. It could result in the attempt to tie two sinking ships together - to borrow a metaphor of Alasdair MacIntyre’s which he used in a different context as a comment on the programme of Analyse & Kritik 30 years ago. But perhaps the reasons for the bad reputation of homo oeconomicus and ideal types are connected so that a common retrieval of their honour could be thinkable. I will contemplate this question in the following considerations that are not very systematical but rather exemplary and fragmentary.

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Titel: MacIntyre and the Polis
Autor: Carey Seal
Seite: 5-16

Abstract: This paper traces Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the development of the Greek polis as presented in A Short History of Ethics, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. The paper argues for the centrality of Aristotle’s conception of po- litics as an architectonic art to this account. It explores the foundations of MacIntyre’s presentation of moral rationality in Homer and offers the poems of Hesiod as an aid to understanding MacIntyre’s view of the post-Homeric crisis in Greek ethics. Aristotle is then invoked to show how MacIntyre represents the polis as a classical response to that crisis.

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Titel: Men at Work: Politics and Labour in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
Autor: Cary J. Nederman
Seite: 17-31

Abstract: In Book 3 of his Politics, and again in Book 7, Aristotle makes explicit his disdain for the banausos (often translated ’mechanic’) as an occupation qualified for full civic life. Where modern admirers of Aristotle, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have taken him at face value concerning this topic and thus felt a need to distance themselves from him, I claim that the grounds that Aristotle offers for the exclusion of banausoi from citizenship are not consistent with other important teachings (found in the eighth book of the Politics as well as in several of his other writings) about the nature of poesis (’productive science’, which is the form of knowledge characteristic of the so-called ’mechanical arts’). I further support this claim with reference to the role played by the mechanical arts within the Aristotelian framework of knowledge that one encounters in medieval European thought between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries, with particular reference to Hugh of St. Victor, John of Salisbury, and Marsiglio of Padua.

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Titel: After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
Autor: Kelvin Knight
Seite: 33-52

Abstract: Philosophical tradition has been challenged by those who would have us look to our own practice, and to nothing beyond. In this, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is followed by the politics of Hannah Arendt, for whom the tradition of political philosophy terminated with Karl Marx’s theorization of labour. This challenge has been met by Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom the young Marx’s reconceptualization of production as a social activity can inform an Aristotelianism that addresses our shared practices in traditional, teleological terms. Looking to the social nature of our practices orientates us to common goods, to the place of those goods in our own lives, and to their place within political communities. MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelian tradition has Heideggerian and other philosophical rivals, but he argues that it represents our best way of theorizing practice.

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Titel: MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
Autor: Thomas Osborne
Seite: 75-90

Abstract: Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of contemporary politics rests in large part on the way in which the political communities of advanced modernity do not recognize common goals and practices. I shall argue that although MacIntyre explicitly recognizes the influence of Jacques Maritain on his own thought, MacIntyre’s own views are incompatible not only with Maritain’s attempt to develop a Thomistic theory which is compatible with liberal democracy, but also relies on a view of the individual as a part which is related to the whole in a way that is incompatible with Maritain’s understanding of the spiritual individual or person.

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Titel: From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
Autor: Christopher Stephen Lutz
Seite: 91-99

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to connect the ’Disquieting Suggestion’ at the beginning of After Virtue to a broader picture of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy. The essay begins with MacIntyre’s fictional scientific catastrophe, and uses four passages from the text of After Virtue to identify the analogous real philosophical catastrophe. The essay relates the resulting critique of modern moral philosophy to MacIntyre’s concern for recognizing the social practices of morality as human actions in ’Notes from the Moral Wilderness’. The essay concludes by considering the implications of MacIntyre’s philosophy for the study of history, realism, and tradition.

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Titel: Unmasking MacIntyre’s Metaphysics of the Self
Autor: Seiriol Morgan
Seite: 157-175

Abstract: This paper focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of the modern self, arguing that we are not as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as he makes out. I claim that MacIntyre’s argument presumes that philosophy has a much greater power to shape individuals and cultures than it in fact has. In particular, he greatly exaggerates the extent to which the character of the modern self has been an effect of the philosophical views of the self that have been influential during the period, leading him to be overly pessimistic about its nature and powers. Finally, I argue that MacIntyre has provided us with no strong reason for thinking that a moral tradition structured by modern values could not be viable.

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Titel: Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
Autor: Bill Bowring
Seite: 205-214

Abstract: This short article starts with Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous critical remarks on human rights in After Virtue, and proceeds to ask whether in fact MacIntyre can be read against himself, taking a range of his own texts. This provides the basis for a sketch of a substantive account of human rights, more historicised and political than those for which MacIntyre has so little time. The article engages with some leading English Aristotelians James Griffin and John Tasioulas in particular. MacIntyre has been a Marxist: this article suggests that perhaps he still is and that a consistent Aristotelian is a Marxist, especially where human rights are concerned.

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Titel: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road Not Taken
Autor: Paul Blackledge
Seite: 215-227

Abstract: This essay questions, through a critique of his reading of classical Marxism, the path taken by Alasdair MacIntyre since his break with the Marxist Left in the 1960s. It argues that MacIntyre was uncharitable in his criticisms of Marxism, or at least in his conflation of the most powerful aspects of the classical Marxist tradition with the crudities of Kautskyian and Stalinist materialism. Contra MacIntyre, this essay locates in the writings of the revolutionary Left which briefly flourished up to and just after the Russian Revolution a rich source of dialectical thinking on the relationship between structure and agency that escapes the twin errors of crude materialism or political voluntarism. Moreover, it suggests that by reaching back to themes reminiscent of the young Marx this tradition laid the basis for a renewed ethical Marxism, and that in his youth MacIntyre pointed to the realisation of this project.

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Titel: Why Business Cannot be a Practice
Autor: Ron Beadle
Seite: 229-241

Abstract: In a series of papers Geoff Moore has applied Alasdair MacIntyre’s much cited work to generate a virtue-based business ethics. Central to this pro ject is Moore’s argument that business falls under MacIntyre’s concept of ’practice’. This move attempts to overcome MacIntyre’s reputation for being ’anti-business’ while maintaining his framework for evaluating social action and replaces MacIntyre’s hostility to management with a conception of managers as institutional practitioners (craftsmen). I argue however that this move has not been justified. Given the importance MacIntyre places on the protection of practices, the result is that much of Moore’s contribution is misplaced. Business cannot name a practice but business institutions certainly do house practices. The task then is to try to understand the circumstances under which practices might flourish and those under which they might founder in a business context. This is not aided by Moore’s redescription of all businesses as practices.

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Titel: What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
Autor: Alasdair MacIntyre
Seite: 261-281

Abstract: The responses to my critics are as various as their criticisms, focusing successively on the distinctive character of modern moral disagreements, on the nature of common goods and their relationship to the virtues, on how the inequalities generated by advanced capitalist economies and by the contemporary state prevent the achievement of common goods, on issues concerning the nature of the self, on what it is that Marx's theory enables us to understand and on how some Marxists have failed to understand, on the differences between my philosophical stances and those both of John McDowell and of the physicalists, on the nature of human rights and of productive work, on the ancient Greek polis, and on the metaphysical commitments presupposed by my theorizing.

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Titel: Aristotelianism versus Communitarianism
Autor: Kelvin Knight
Seite: 259-273

Abstract: Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian critic of communitarianism, which he understands to be committed to the politics of the capitalist and bureaucratic nation state. The politics he proposes instead is based in the resistance to managerial institutions of what he calls 'practices', because these are schools of virtue. This shares little with the communitarianism of a Taylor or the Aristotelianism of a Gadamer. Although practices require formal institutions. MacIntyre opposes such conservative politics. Conventional accounts of a 'liberal-communitarian debate' in political philosophy face the dilemma that Alasdair MacIntyre, often identified as a paradigmatic communitarian, has consistently and emphatically repudiated this characterization. Although neo-Aristotelianism is sometimes seen as a philosophical warrant for communitarian politics, MacIntyre's Aristotelianism is opposed to communitarianism. This paper explores the rationale of that opposition.

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Titel: Is Analytical Action Theory Reductionist?
Autor: Ian Carter
Seite: 61-66

Abstract: Steven Lukes and Alasdair MacIntyre have accused analytical action theory of being motivated by reductionist aims and of ignoring the fact that what is distinctively human about actions is their essentially social character. These reductionist aims are said to 'subvert, the search for the distinctively human. Enterprises that have particularly come under fire (and which Lukes recommends ,abandoning,) are the search for 'basic' actions and attempts to solve problems regarding the 'individuation' of actions. Lukes and MacIntyre are mistaken however, both in their interpretation of the aims which motivate analytical action theory, and in their characterisation of the search for the distinctively human. 'Individuated' or 'basic' actions are not complex social actions reduced down to their 'simplest elements'. They represent attempts to resolve problems which arise prior to the examination of the social character of actions.

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Titel: Rights, Practices and Marxism: Reply to Six Critics
Autor: Alasdair MacIntyre
Seite: 234-248

Abstract: The first part of the paper expands and strengthens the criticism of appeals to human or natural rights in After Virtue. It is argued that Gewirth's responses to various objections are inadequate and that Flathman's historical analysis is incompatible with the evidence. Baier's charge that the treatment of Hume in After Virtue is inadequate is acknowledged to be true. A comparison of an Aristotelian account of rational cooperation with a Humean account is made the basis for a rejection both of Baier's assimilation of the two standpoints and of the treatment of the concept of a practice by both Miller and Doppelt. Doppelt's rival account of the moral structures of modernity is held to be undermined both by facts which he himself recognizes and by the Marxist critique of liberal individualism. Marxism's positive moral stance, as defended by Nielsen, is too impoverished to achieve what Nielsen claims for it.

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Titel: Cultural Pessimism and the Setting aside of Marxism
Autor: Kai Nielsen
Seite: 75-100

Abstract: I examine Alasdair MacIntyre's grounds for setting aside Marxism. I find them wanting. I argue that his criticisms are either unsound or fail to consider plausible alternative readings of Marxism which would elude what, on the reading MacIntyre gives, are sound criticisms. I consider MacIntyre's remarks about Marx's predictions, his remarks about the moral failures of Marxism and its alleged theoretical impoverishment in considering questions of value.

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Titel: The Claims of After Virtue
Autor: Alasdair MacIntyre
Seite: 3-7

Abstract: After Virtue claims that it is characteristic of contemporary society that its debates are peculiarly unsettlable; that this state of society affairs is the result of the failure by the thinkers of the Enlightenment to construct a rational, secular defence of shared moral principles; and that the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues provides the only rationally defensible alternative to post-Enlightenment morality.

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Titel: Culture, Morality and Rights: Or, Should Alasdair MacIntyre's Philosophical Driving License Be Suspended?
Autor: Richard E. Flathman
Seite: 8-27

Abstract: Taken at face value, Professor Maclntyre's charge that modern culture is "emotivist" is conceptually incoherent and betrays epistemological confusion. Examination of the modern concept and practice of rights indicates hat his comparisons between modern and pre-modern cultures exaggerate the irrationality, individualism, and fragmentation of the former, the rationalism, unity, and communalism of the latter. There are important differences among the several cultural forms that Maclntyre distinguishes. It is less clear that, lacking (as he admittedly does) a satisfactory account of moral reasoning, Maclntyre has made persuasive his case for abandoning modern liberalism in favor of communalism inspired by pre-modern cultures.

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Titel: Philosophy and its History
Autor: Alasdair MacIntyre
Seite: 102-113

Abstract: Richard Rorty argues that the present state of analytic Philosophy is the result of the collapse of the logical empiricist program. But most of the characteristics of analytic philosophy which Rorty ascribes to that collapse predated logical empiricism. The historical explanation of the present state of philosophy must begin not later than with the schism between philosophy and the other disciplines in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin then leads to a different view of how philosophical problems are generated.

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Social Theory Today. 30 Years of Analyse & Kritik
2008 (30) Heft 2

Editorial
The founders and editors of this journal who got together thirty years ago to deliberate on its programme, had been influenced both by the critical and emancipatory aims of the Marxist tradition and by the rigour and sophistication of analytic philosophy. At the same time they were also dissatisfied with both traditions. They were repelled by the sectarian sides of Marxist economics, frustrated by the inscrutable language of the Hegelian Marxists and puzzled by the lack of explicit normative arg...

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Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics,Resistance and Utopia
2008 (30) Heft 1
Guest-Editors: Kelvin Knight / Paul Blackledge

Editorial
This special issue is composed of revisions of papers originally presented at a conference on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia, hosted by the Human Rights and Social Justice Research Institute at London Metropolitan University from 29th June to 1st July 2007. In publishing them, Analyse & Kritik demonstrates a continuing interest in MacIntyre’s work which began with an important symposium on After Virtue in 1984, 6(1). Now republished in a thi...

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The Actuality of Communitarianism
2005 (27) Heft 2

Editorial
'Communitarianism' drew extraordinary public attention in the early nineties and still exerts some influence on the social sciences and political philosophy, even if it is no longer as controversially debated as in former days. What still fires interest in the claims and ideas of communitarianism today, albeit on a lower level of public attention, is the widely felt fascination, in part perhaps also trepidation, vis-a-vis non-individualist social phenomena and trans-individualist social values a...

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Symposium über Alasdair MacIntyres, "After Virtue"
1984 (6) Heft 1

Editorial
Das vorliegende Heft ist fast ausschließlich einer Diskussion über Alasdair MacIntyres Buch After Virtue gewidmet. Der Grund dafür besteht nicht nur darin, daß After Virtue in der angelsächsischen Philosophie z. Z. eines der meist diskutierten moralphilosophischen Bücher ist, sondern vor allem auch in seinem interdisziplinären Ansatz, durch den die Grenzen zwischen normativer Ethik und empirisch-theoretischer Sozialwissenschaft überschritten werden sollen.

Hauptmotiv von After Virtue ...

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