Alasdair MacIntyre famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Christian #Atheist #Given
Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#War #Mean #Politics
At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Lying #Thinking #Foundation
Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Stories
What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means,
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#War #Mean #Matter
Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Psychology #Utterance #Action
It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Practice #Community #Participation
[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Culture #Stranger #Appearance
Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress - or to fail to make progress - toward a given end.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Life #Moving #Journey
Raymond Aron ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable.' ... while [Weber] holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational...
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Commitment #Views #Choices
I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Facts #Moral #Judgment
The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#War #People #Way
There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Past #Expression #Two
Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Numbers #Doe #Alive
Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Religious #Philosophy #Political
It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Kings #Children #Drama
I can only answer the question â€˜What am I to do?â€™ if I can answer the prior question â€˜Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?â€™
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Stories #Answers
The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Thinking #Culture #Systematic
A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Political #Doctrine #World
Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Rejection #Systematic #Conservative
We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict,
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Waiting #Different #Godot
Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.
-- Alasdair MacIntyre

#Thinking #Way #Virtue

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