I was very privileged to be able to attend a lecture by Alasdair MacIntyre at Catholic University here in DC over the weekend. The topic was “Ends and Endings”, and the speech was a delightfully rambling overview of the connections between teleology and literature, ethics and . . . . Continue Reading »
Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue 1913–1922by alasdair macintyrerowman & littlefield, 224 pages, $25.95 In the summer of 1921, while visiting friends, Edith Stein chanced upon the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Reading through the night, she completed an important stage in her own . . . . Continue Reading »
I was starting the second year of a Ph.D. program in U.S. history at the University of Delaware when the professor who would direct my dissertation, Guy Alchon, dropped a remarkable book into my mailbox: Christopher Shannon’s Conspicuous Criticism: Tradition, the Individual, and Culture in . . . . Continue Reading »
Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues By Alasdair MacIntyre. Open Court. 166 pp. $26.95 The MacIntyre Reader Edited by Kelvin Knight.University of Notre Dame Press. 300 pp. $40 It would be hard to think of any book of moral philosophy written in the last fifty years that has . . . . Continue Reading »
Moral philosophers are caught in a peculiar paradox these days. On the one hand, their field is flourishing: No longer intimidated by the logical positivists (who denied truth to moral assertions except as expressions of likes and dislikes), thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and . . . . Continue Reading »
From all appearances, it is now back in style to be critical of American individualism. Indeed, that critique has never gone entirely out of style, and for very good reasons. But views on these matters also seem to follow cycles which, if not of Schlesingerian predictability, are nevertheless . . . . Continue Reading »
Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reasonby John MilbankBasil Blackwell, 443 pages, $64.95 John Milbank does not get a very good press in Britain. He is viewed as a young upstart who is breaking the accepted conventions of Christian ethics. His main crime is that he wants to develop the . . . . Continue Reading »
Those who were once called atheists are now the most reliable defenders not of the gods but of the good reasons for this regime of ordered liberty. Such people are the best citizens not despite but because their loyalty to the civitas is qualified by a higher loyalty. . . . . Continue Reading »
Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry by Alasdair MacIntyre University of Notre Dame Press, 241 pages, $24.95 Over the course of the last five years or so the quality of philosophical inquiry into both ethical and religious matters has increased significantly. Martha Nussbaum’s The . . . . Continue Reading »
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