alasdair macintyre, the tasks of philosophy: selected essays, volume 1, cambridge university press, 2006, 230pp. $70.00 hbk , isbn 0521854377 ethics and politics: selected essays, volume 2, 239pp. These two volumes of essays are devoted to the twin concerns that have long animated alasdair macintyre 39 s work. In a short history of ethics 1967 he argued that philosophy cannot hope to rise above the vicissitudes of history by turning to meta ethics and focusing on the timeless meaning of right and good , since what they mean reflects the substantive ethical outlooks in which they figure and so is bound to change over time. It was in the same historical spirit that he developed in after virtue 1981 his well known critique of modernity.

The irresolvable conflicts we face between respecting rights and promoting the general good, between individual happiness and allegiance to community, are in reality symptoms of an underlying disarray. The intellectual resources at our disposal are but fragments of an overall, essentially aristotelian vision of the human good that has lost the authority it once enjoyed. The essays in volume 2 of the present collection ethics and politics , largely written in the 1990s, pursue this critique in some new directions. The most interesting chapters have to do with the differences between aristotle and some of his renaissance and modern followers, the nature of the prohibition against lying, and the contemporary fascination with moral dilemmas. It is his concern with the nature of philosophy in general its aims and procedures, its fundamental concepts such as truth and reason , its relation to its own history and to society at large. The essays in volume 1 the tasks of philosophy take up these issues, usually with a close eye on the implications for ethics, but ranging widely over other areas of philosophy as well.

They reach farther back than those in the second volume, some of them to the 1970s and thus to a period before macintyre had become, in the aftermath of after virtue. The thomistic aristotelian he now terms himself and who wrote all the essays in volume 2. One of the older pieces epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science 1977 offers some valuable insight into the nature of that philosophical conversion.

It explains why his turn to aristotle and aquinas has taken the form of an appeal to the idea of tradition that has no real parallel in their own thought. It may be indeed one of the most important essays he ever wrote, a major turning point in my thinking as he observes in the volume 39 s preface i, vii. In this essay, macintyre sets about drawing some broad epistemological lessons from the writings of thomas kuhn and imre lakatos.

What they have taught us, he argues, is that the sciences do not set about solving problems on the basis of universally available canons of inductive inference and explanatory adequacy. Instead, problems are identified and solved in accord with the more specific standards of some developing conception of how inquiry should proceed in the given domain, some paradigm or research program or as macintyre prefers to say, some tradition. Scientific progress is only intelligible in comparative and historical terms, as a kind of dramatic narrative. The reason to accept some theory is not that it accounts for the evidence absolutely speaking, but rather that it does so better than its rivals have done. For macintyre, the consequences extend beyond the philosophy of science to the nature of systematic inquiry in general. Contrary to the usual assumptions of rationalists and traditionalists alike, reason and tradition do not stand inherently opposed to one another.

It has to rely on the standards of some specific and ongoing approach to a given subject matter, and since these standards can change as different theories are devised to handle new problems, no tradition in this sense simply passes down unaltered some supposedly age old pieces of wisdom: a tradition is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition i, 11, 16. These general conclusions had in turn a deep influence on macintyre 39 s subsequent work in ethics. Having long recognized the way moral self understanding is always historically situated, he now had the means to prevent this recognition from slipping, as it can easily do, into skepticism or cultural relativism. Our moral thinking counts as an exercise of reason, if it forms part of some substantive ethical tradition able to preserve its best insights while adapting to handle new problems as they arise and succeeding in this better than its rivals. In macintyre 39 s view, aristotelian ethics is just such a tradition, superior in these regards to the modern currents of kantianism and utilitarianism that have sought to supersede it. Whether or not this assessment is fair, it bears pointing out that neither aristotle nor aquinas conceived of their ethical thinking as a tradition in this sense. They lacked the historical sensibility and sense of contingency which that concept embodies and which are so much a part of our own modern consciousness.

This 1977 essay illuminates therefore one important aspect of what macintyre means by his thomist aristotelianism. Indeed, the great value of this collection as a whole is the new light it throws on the distinctive features of his own moral philosophy. Another key aspect also comes out in volume i, particularly in first principles, final ends, and contemporary philosophical issues 1990 and moral relativism, truth, and justification 1994. According to macintyre, aristotelian moral philosophy aims at acquiring the truth about its subject matter. It therefore displays the basic characteristic of every kind of pursuit of knowledge, which is, as aristotle said in the metaphysics.

Truth is the goal which our various practices of formulating, examining, and testing knowledge claims are designed to achieve. We always judge truth, of course, from the standpoint of the standards and beliefs we presently endorse. But the goal is to discover the way things really are, independently of the process by which we develop our views about them. This realistic conception of truth, he argues, constitutes the valid core of the familiar if disputed idea of truth as correspondence, the idea that thomas formulated in de veritate i.1 as the adaequatio rei et intellectus i, 200, 210 also ii, 77. It stands opposed to recent attempts robert brandom and crispin wright are discussed to equate truth with rational justification or warranted assertibility under ideal conditions.

Such accounts run together the nature of truth and our means of access to it, the goal and the activities aimed at the goal. For the ways we go about evaluating hypotheses subjecting them, for instance, to severe rather than easy tests draw their rationale from the end, getting it right about the world, to which they are presumed to move us closer. So too, the circumstances under which we need to examine beliefs we already hold are determined by the goal that critical reflection of this sort is meant to achieve.

It is no sign of rationality to be constantly asking whether our beliefs are justified. It is when and only when the truth about some subject matter is at issue that there is point or purpose in advancing and evaluating them i, 58. Moreover, proposals to explicate truth in terms of assertibility under ideal conditions appear condemned to failure. If the idealized procedures of justification still bear some mark of the actual practices that are their model, then it remains possible to imagine that beliefs satisfying such procedures may fall short of capturing the way things really are. The more the procedures are idealized, however, so as to foreclose that possibility, the less we can say anything about them except that they are ideal in virtue of allowing us to discern what it indeed true i, 56f.