Alasdair MacIntyre

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Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (born January 12, 1929 in Glasgow ) is a Scottish-American philosopher and is one of the main proponents of communitarianism . MacIntyre takes the view that the project of enlightenment in the sense of a rational foundation of moral action has failed. His main intention is a rehabilitation of the Aristotelian virtue ethics , with which he turns against the Kantian ethics and its various liberal and discourse ethical developments in the present. MacIntyre has met with a particularly strong response from Anglo-American analytical philosophy .

Life

MacIntyre studied at the College Queen Mary of London University and at the University of Manchester . From 1951 to 1970 he was first a lecturer in philosophy and the philosophy of religion, then professor of sociology at the English universities of Manchester, Leeds, Oxford and Essex. In 1970 he emigrated to the USA and taught from 1970 to 1972 as a professor for the history of ideas at Brandeis University . During the following years he was Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at Boston University , from 1980 to 1982 at Wellesley College . He then took over a professorship in philosophy at Vanderbilt University . From 1988 until his retirement in 2010, MacIntyre taught philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 1985), the British Academy (since 1994), the American Philosophical Society (since 2006) and the Royal Irish Academy (since 1999).

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MacIntyre dealt with issues of ideology criticism , psychoanalysis and moral history before his philosophy developed into a time-critical moral philosophy . The thematic variety of his teaching activities is reflected in his numerous works on the history of ideas, critical of ideology and moral philosophy.

In his writings Marxism (1953), Difficulties in Christian Belief (1959) and Marxism and Christianity (1968), MacIntyre takes a critical look at Marxism and its relationship to Christianity . While he initially tried to combine Marxism with the social contents of Christianity (1953), later (1968) he no longer saw a real alternative in Marxism, but also an embodiment of the failed modern society.

MacIntyre then concerned himself more and more closely with the Western moral tradition. As a result, the plant is being built in 1966 A Short History of Ethics (dt .: history of ethics at a Glance , 1994). MacIntyre criticizes here the unhistorical view of morality as it is characteristic of analytical philosophy. In contrast, he tries to reconstruct the respective moral concepts within their historical and cultural context. In terms of content, there is a sympathy for the Aristotelian and a criticism of the Kantian ethics, as it is later systematically developed in After Virtue .

Critical to MacIntyre applies also in his early study The Unconscious (1958, dt .: The unconscious. A Conceptual Analysis , 1968) against the psychoanalysis of Freud and its central concept of the unconscious .

In the US in 1981 his most important work occurs After Virtue (dt .: The loss of virtue , 1995) that it has also made known internationally. In it he criticizes the modern moral philosophy, which is committed to the Enlightenment project, and current social morality as a whole, and pleads for a contemporary revival of ethical Aristotelianism . For MacIntyre, completely opposite positions are apparently represented with conclusive arguments in current moral philosophy. For him, this is an indication that the language of morality has passed into a state of disorder. The result of this process of decline is ethical emotivism , for which moral judgments are ultimately only an expression of feelings or personal preferences. This moral relativism has penetrated deeply into the self-image of Western culture, in which no longer justifiable value decisions have become the starting point for all social action. MacIntyre sees this as the fateful outcome of the Enlightenment Project. His criticism is primarily directed against the formalism of the Kantian moral philosophy, from which no substantial moral position can be developed and which led to the decisionism of Kierkegaard and the subjectivism of Nietzsche .

In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) MacIntyre extends his theses critical of the Enlightenment to the fields of justice and practical rationality. In his Gifford Lectures of 1988 (published in 1990 under the title Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition ), he takes up the topic of the modernization-induced disintegration of the uniform moral tradition into several incommensurable moral language systems.

In his book Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (German: The recognition of dependence. About human virtues , 2001) MacIntyre presented the draft of a virtue ethic in 1999, which expands the previous Aristotelian orientation of his thinking through references to Thomas Aquinas . MacIntyre analyzes the structure of needs of the human individual who is fundamentally dependent on the other members of his community (family, neighborhood, etc.). This becomes most evident in certain phases of life (childhood, old age) and situations (illness, disability) when our entire physical existence depends on others. In addition, there is a fundamental dependence of the individual on specific communities in order to achieve his or her ultimate goal of becoming an independent subject. For MacIntyre, the recognition of dependence is the key to independence.

Moral theory

Moral action and tradition

For MacIntyre, moral action is only possible within a community . Traditions play a crucial role in communities. Traditions are subject to constant development. You start with an authoritarian stage in which certain beliefs, texts and statements are unquestionably adopted by authorities. In the course of history, conflicts and crises can arise which lead to these authorities being questioned and their guidelines being reformulated. In this way, the existing traditions are continuously developed until a point is reached at which progress is no longer possible within an existing tradition. If conflicts arise in a tradition that can no longer be dealt with within it, these result in an “ epistemological crisis”. This crisis can be overcome by understanding a competing tradition. As long as there is no “epistemological crisis”, different traditions can coexist. In the case of conflicts between traditions there is no way of resolving them rationally, as there are no tradition-independent criteria of rationality.

Moral crisis of the present

In his main work After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory , MacIntyre criticizes the “rationalistic” morality of the Enlightenment since Kant , which did not give humans roots. Following on from the Nicomachean ethics of Aristotle , he wants to revive the tradition of virtue ethics .

For him, contemporary social morality and moral philosophy are the result of a story of moral decline that can be divided into three phases:

  1. a pre-Enlightenment, Aristotelian phase in which the justification of norms of practice in the context of lifeworld tradition and social life practice succeeded
  2. a phase under the sign of the Enlightenment, in which abstract projects of justification, disregarding history, lifeworld and experience, claiming general validity and timelessness, were undertaken and failed
  3. a phase culminating in the cultural cynicism of the present, in which the insight into the failure of the Enlightenment has prevailed, instrumental reason triumphs and arbitrariness and arbitrariness prevail behind the Enlightenment mask

According to MacIntyre, a way out of the cultural crisis of the present can only be found by giving up the entire paradigm of the Enlightenment ethics and by regaining the virtuous ethical perspective of Aristotelianism.

Fonts (selection)

  • Marxism. An Interpretation , London 1953
  • The unconscious. A Conceptual Analysis , New York 1958
  • A Short History of Ethics. A History of Moral Philosophy from the Homeric Age to the Twentieth Century . Routledge, London 1967, ISBN 0-415-04027-2 (German: History of Ethics at a Glance. From the Age of Homer to the 20th Century Hain, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-445-04770-7 )
  • After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press 1981, ISBN 0-268-00594-X ; second edition 1984, with a postscript; third edition 2007, with a new foreword: "After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century" (German: The loss of virtue. On the moral crisis of the present . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-28793-1 )
  • Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition . UND Press, Notre Dame 1990, ISBN 0-268-01877-4
  • Whose Justice? Which Rationality? UND Press, Notre Dame 1988, ISBN 0-268-01944-4
  • Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtues . Duckworth, London 1999, ISBN 0-7156-2902-6 (German: The recognition of addiction. About human virtues. Rotbuch, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-434-53088-6 )

literature

  • Thomas D. D'Andrea: Tradition, Rationality And Virtue: The Thought of Alasdair Macintyre , Ashgate Publishing 2006
  • Jürgen Goldstein : Perspectives on Political Thought: Six Portraits. Hannah Arendt , Dolf Sternberger , John Rawls , Jürgen Habermas , Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor . Velbrück Wissenschaft, Weilerswist 2012, ISBN 978-3-942393-30-0
  • John Horton, Susan Mendus (Eds.): After MacIntyre. Critical Perspectives an the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre . Cambridge 1994, ISBN 978-0268006433
  • Wolfgang Kersting : Alasdair MacIntyre . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin , Elif Özmen (Ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 423). 3rd, revised and updated edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-520-42303-0 , pp. 413-417.
  • Christopher Stephen Lutz: Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy , Lexington Books 2009
  • Mark C. Murphy: Alasdair MacIntyre (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus) , Cambridge University Press 2003
  • Jack Russell Weinstein: On MacIntyre (Wadsworth Philosophers Series) . Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont 2003

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ Alasdair MacIntyre expressly distanced himself from the attribution and hope of communitarianism: "I'm Not a Communitarian, But ..." In: The Responsive Community . tape I , 1991, p. 91-92 .
  2. ↑ See Wolfgang Kersting: Alasdair MacIntyre . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin (ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to v. Wright . 3rd edition, Kröner, Stuttgart 2007, pp. 413–417 (here p. 414f.)
personal data
SURNAME MacIntyre, Alasdair
ALTERNATIVE NAMES MacIntyre, Alasdair Chalmers (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish-American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow