Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

Description

After Virtue is a watershed in MacIntyre's career. It follows his emergence from Marxism, but draws on Marxist sources and arguments. It precedes his move to Thomism, but already draws on Augustine and Aquinas. Because of its watershed nature, it has gained a wide readership in various fields but it treats a variety of issues in ways that are unfamiliar either to Marxists schooled in the social sciences or to Thomists schooled in medieval metaphysics. Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue provides a commentary that will be accessible to students, valuable to scholars, and useful to teachers. Students will find help to navigate the two main arguments of After Virtue, to understand its interpretation of history, and to engage its proposal for a form of ethics and politics that returns to the tradition of the virtues. Scholars will find the book useful as a general guide to MacIntyre's ethics. Teachers will find a book that can help to direct their students' reading and keep classroom discussions focused on the book's central concerns.

Christopher Stephen Lutz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, USA. He is the author of Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy (Lexington Books, 2004; paperback w/ new preface, 2009).

"In the thirty years since I wrote After Virtue I have become keenly aware that it is not always easy reading and that even attentive readers sometimes need help. Christopher Lutz has the gifts of a first-rate commentator and guide and his readers will be as indebted to him as I am."Alasdair MacIntyre "Reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is a thorough yet succinct, clear and accessible yet scholarly introductory overview and critical engagement with one of the most important works on ethics in the last 50 years. Exhaustively researched and exceptionally well-written by a leading MacIntyre scholar, it is sure to be the standard work on the subject for many years to come. In a word, Christopher Lutz's latest volume on MacIntyre hits the ball out of the park. You cannot want to understand MacIntyre and not read this book." -- Bruce Ballard, Professor of Philosophy, Lincoln University, USA "Lutz's commentary on Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue illuminates both its context and its content. After Virtue was not a mere dissent within the framework of modern ethics but a rejection of the framework itself. MacIntyre both needed and deserved an interpreter with Lutz's clarity of style and depth of understanding. Lutz ably traces the path MacIntyre took from his early Marxism to his incorporation of Aristotle. Lutz then defends MacIntyre's critique of modern ethics as a disastrous fetishism of rules detached from community. This defense should spark a wider discussion among contemporary moralists of MacIntyre's goal-based ethics." -- Milton Fisk, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Indiana University, USA "Only someone with a deep knowledge of Alasdair MacIntyre's work could write a book like this. Chris Lutz, who is extremely knowledgeable of MacIntyre's corpus, has done us the great favor of contextualizing the arguments of After Virtue. I was particularly taken with his distinction between action and behavior as crucial for understanding MacIntyre's entire project. This is not only one of the best introductions we have of MacIntyre, but this is a book that advances MacIntyre's argument with modernity in a manner that suggests how we might go on. I highly recommend this book as a necessary companion to After Virtue." -- Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, Duke Divinity School, USA