After Virtue

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...

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."

A.麦金太尔（1929— ）　早年就读于曼彻斯特大学，先后执教于曼彻斯特大学、利兹大学、波士顿大学与维特比德大学，现任美国鹿特丹大学哲学系麦克马洪与哈克荣誉教授。麦金太尔是当代西方最重要的伦理学家之一，伦理学与政治哲学中社群主义运动的代表人物。从二十世纪五十年代起，麦金太尔以其大量的著作，对摩尔以来的元伦理学进行了不懈的攻击。他的重要著作《追寻美德》（1981）、《谁的合理性，谁的正义》（1988）以及《三种对立的道德探究观》（1990），在对西方现代性的根源的追溯中，促进了亚里士多德的德性伦理学在当代的复兴。