Macintyre’s After Virtue and the Disagreement about Disagreement

Abstract

DOI: 10.5294/pecu.2012.15.2.3

It is the purpose of this paper both to define the problem which MacIntyre is aimed at solving in After Virtue and to locate the basic assumptions and contentions on which the argu- ment for his main proposal, i.e. a revival of Aristotelianism, ultimately rely. This task seems rather unproblematic itself and simply accessible to an attentive reading of the text. However, as I hope to show, a precise characterization of the problem, of the argument and, even, of the main thesis of After Virtue happens to be, at a closer look, evasive (to say the least), given the intricate way in which MacIntyre presents his ideas. The present paper is, in the main, a successive reformulation of each of the aforementioned issues. What initially gives itself as the problem to be solved and what, at first instance, the argument appears to be pointing to, requires in each case substantial qualification as soon as one tries to make out of the text a unified and self-contained whole. The remarkable fact that our sight begins to blur in the same measure as the demand for focus and contour is applied to the text might have been the price to pay for the impressive way in which the author tries to keep track of such comprehensive and multifarious strands of thought as his ambitious task seems intrinsically to require. DOI: 10.5294/pecu.2012.15.2.3