Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes on Knowledge
Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929), the Scottish-American philosopher whose After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) gave late-twentieth-century moral philosophy its most influential traditionalist alternative to post-Enlightenment liberal universalism, defended the doctrine that rationality is itself tradition-constituted: there is no view from nowhere from which competing accounts of justice and the human good could be arbitrated, and inquiry proceeds from within the resources of a particular living tradition that may, through internal crisis and encounter with rivals, undergo cognitive progress. The framework grounds MacIntyre's mature defence of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition.
Quotes
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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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“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 -
“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