After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory » (3rd Edition)

When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Newsweek called it "a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world." Now, twenty-five years later, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, which includes a new prologue "After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century."

In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. In the Third Edition prologue, MacIntyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has "as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions" of this book. He remains "committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity."

About the Author:
Alasdair MacIntyre is research professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame

Prologue: After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century     ix
Preface     xvii
A Disquieting Suggestion     1
The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism     6
Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context     23
The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality     36
Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail     51
Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project     62
'Fact', Explanation and Expertise     79
The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power     88
Nietzsche or Aristotle?     109
The Virtues of Heroic Societies     121
The Virtues of Athens     131
Aristotle's Account of the Virtues     146
Medieval Aspects and Occasions     165
The Nature of the Virtues     181
The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition     204
From the Virtues to Virtue and after Virtue     226
Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions     244
After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky and St. Benedict     256
Postscript to the Second Edition     264
Bibliography     279
Index     283