Utopian Thinking
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Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing
Q: In our last conversation, you said that there is no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. Are you saying that there is no objective ‘something’ that we have to measure the accuracy of our perceptions and knowledge against? A: No. But we have to frame the way we understand the relationship between the knower
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No Narrative, no Virtue; No Virtue, no Narrative
In After Virtue, MacIntyre moves from the chapter “Nietzsche or Aristotle” to a consideration about what virtue meant in what he calls heroic societies—the societies represented in the Homeric epics, the Norse Edda, the Irish stories in the Ulster Cycle, etc. His point is one that I’ve often made—that Christian Europe was always as much
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More on Eudaemonia
[Alasdair MacIntyre seems to be having a moment, and if you want a succinct overview of his thought, David Brooks’s piece today in The Atlantic is pretty good. I’m going to get into the MacIntyre weeds later this summer as part of my longer term Utopian Thinking project. The problem with conservatives like Brooks is
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Is Moral Maturity a Thing?
[Inspired by David Bentley Hart’s All Things, I’m going to use this dialogic form from time to time in hopes that it will make some of my arguments easier to engage with. In this post, I’m attempting to set up why it’s important to understand the argument that Alasdair MacIntyre is making in his After
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Work: Alienation or Soulcraft
Matthew Crawford's Phronetic Philosophy The idea of agency I have tried to illustrate in this book is different. It is activity directed toward some end that is affirmed as good by the actor, but this affirmation is not something arbitrary and private. Rather, it flows from an apprehension of real features of the world. This