28+ Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes On Education, Philosophy And Conflicts Of Modernity

Alasdair MacIntyre is a Scottish philosopher who is known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy. He is best known for his 1981 book After Virtue, which examines the decline of morality in the modern world and proposes a way to restore virtue ethics. MacIntyre has also written extensively on topics such as the nature of rationality, the history of philosophy, and the relationship between religion and morality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Alasdair MacIntyre on education, life, love.

Top 10 Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes

1. It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
2. Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
3. What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
4. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
5. We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
6. Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.
7. Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.
8. Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.
9. Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
10. I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’

Alasdair MacIntyre Short Quotes

• Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.
• Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
• The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
• What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Alasdair MacIntyre Famous Quotes And Sayings

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition — Alasdair MacIntyre

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. — Alasdair MacIntyre

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

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

Raymond Aron ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable.' ... while [Weber] holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture — Alasdair MacIntyre

At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The hypothesis I wish to advance is thatthe language of morality is ingrave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have--very largely if not entirely--lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. — Alasdair MacIntyre

[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. — Alasdair MacIntyre

There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Life Lessons by Alasdair MacIntyre

1. Alasdair MacIntyre's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the moral and political traditions of a society in order to make meaningful ethical decisions.
2. He argues that individuals must be able to recognize the limitations of their own moral perspectives and strive to understand the perspectives of others in order to make ethical decisions that benefit the whole of society.
3. He encourages us to think critically and to question the moral and political conventions of our own society in order to create a more just and equitable society.