Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a Scottish-American moral and political philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. His After Virtue, published in 1981, argued that modern moral discourse is the surviving fragment of a coherence it has lost, and that the recovery of intelligible ethical life requires a recovery of tradition, narrative, and practice. The quotes below are attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre, organized by topic.
Browse Alasdair MacIntyre by topic
Alasdair MacIntyre on God
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“In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and also in To My Fellow Teachers (1975) Philip Rieff has documented with devastating insight a number of the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness. The idioms of therapy have invaded all too successfully such spheres as those of education and of religion.”
pp. 30-31 -
“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant.”
pp. 44-45
Alasdair MacIntyre on Knowledge
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“Marcuse’s collection of revolutionary forces is a list so familiar in radical circles that we must be careful not to miss its extreme heterogeneity: the student movement in the United States, the black population of the urban slums in the United States, the Chinese cultural revolution, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Cuba. There are three elements in this collection: there are first the ”
On Marcuse ", New York Times Review of Books, October 23, 1969. (Reprinted in Marcuse (1970), p. 89.) -
“My view that tolerance and rationality are intimately connected is not merely an a priori thesis. The transformation of Marxism from a rationally held into an irrationally held body of theory is a transformation which was the result of Marxists cutting themselves off from possibilities of criticism and refutation. The use of state power to defend Marxism as the one set of true beliefs in the Sovie”
On Marcuse ", New York Times Review of Books, October 23, 1969. (Reprinted in Marcuse (1970), pp. 91-92.) -
“Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue , 1913-1922 (ed. 2007)”
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 on Mind
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“Man without his stories is unintelligible.”
Alasdair MacIntyre on Nature
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“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.”
A Short History of Ethics
Alasdair MacIntyre on Politics
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“A living tradition is an historically extended, socially embodied argument.”
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time.”
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“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”
Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue , 1913-1922 (ed. 2007)
Alasdair MacIntyre on Time
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“A Short History of Ethics”
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 on Virtue
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story do I find myself a part?'”
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“Practices are constituted by goods internal to them.”
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“The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique , with effectiveness … The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness … Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They … purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, … to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.”
p. 30 -
“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.”
p. 35