Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original...

MacIntyre's project, here as elsewhere, is to put up a fight against philosophical relativism. . . . The current form is the 'incommensurability, ' so-called, of differing standpoints or conceptual schemes. Mr. MacIntyre claims that different schools of philosophy must differ fundamentally about what counts as a rational way to settle intellectual differences. Reading between the lines, one can see that he has in mind nationalities as well as thinkers, and literary criticism as well as academic philosophy. More explicitly, he labels and discusses three significantly different standpoints: the...

MacIntyre gives the reader an extremely perceptive account of the role of religion in modern culture and society as a whole. Three convictions underlie this book. The first is that an educated Catholic laity needs to understand a good deal more about Catholic philosophical thought than it does now. The warring partisans on the great issues that engage our culture and politics presuppose the truth of some philosophical theses and the falsity of others. Second, argues MacIntyre, Catholic philosophy is best understood historically, as a continuing conversation through the centuries, in which...