Alasdair maclntyre's "rationality of traditions" and tradition-transcendental standards of justification

Journal of Religion

Volumn 78, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 524-545

  Herat, Jennifer A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049121736     PISSN: 00224189     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/490289     Document Type: Article

References (32)

1. Jon P. Gunneman, "Habermas and MacIntyre on Moral Learning," Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1994): 93.
2. Gregory Jones, "Alasdair MacIntyre on Narrative, Community, and the Moral Life," Modern Theology 4 (1987): 58.
3. See Max Stackhouse, "Alasdair MacIntyre: Overview and Evaluation," Religious Studies Review 18 (1992): 204;
4. Jeffrey Stout, "Homeward Bound: MacIntyre on Liberal Society and the History of Ethics," Journal of Religion 69 (1989): 221;
5. Peter J. Mehl, "In the Twilight of Modernity: MacIntyre and Mitchell on Moral Traditions and Their Assessment," Journal of Religious Ethics 19 (1991): 23.
6. Jones, p. 59.
7. Stout, "Homeward Bound," p. 232.
8. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). (In subsequent references to this work, the title will be indicated as AV.)
9. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 334. (In subsequent references to this work, the title will be indicated as WJ.)
10. MacIntyre, AV, p. 246.
11. Maclntyre, WJ, p. 346.
12. and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1990) (abbreviated as FP), and these will be pointed out parenthetically where they are not fully discussed. An earlier version of this discussion is contained in MacIntyre's 1984 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association, reprinted as "Relativism, Power, and Philosophy," in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 182-204.
13. MacIntyre, WJ, p. 354;
14. see also TRV, pp. 116 ff.
15. MacIntyre, WJ, p. 359.
16. and TRV, p. 114.
17. and, see also, TRV, pp. 125, 146.
18. MacIntyre, WJ, p. 403.
19. See my Religion and Faction in Hume's Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
20. See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (New York: Viking, 1976), pp. 206-12.
21. Walter Jackson Bate, "The Sympathetic Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Criticism," English Literary History 12 (1945): 144-64: "Among the more common romantic dicta which had their roots in the preceding century was the insistence that the imagination, by an effort of sympathetic intuition, is able to penetrate the barrier which space puts between it and its object, and, by actually entering into the object, so to speak, secure a momentary but complete identification with it."
22. and FP, pp. 48-51.
23. Jean Porter, "Openness and Constraint: Moral Reflection as Tradition-Guided Inquiry in Alasdair MacIntyre's Recent Works," Journal of Religion 73 (1993): 516.
24. MacIntyre, WJ, p. 354.
25. MacIntyre, WJ, p. 364.
26. Mehl, p. 48.
27. See MacIntyre, WJ, p. 360.
28. John Haldane, "MacIntyre's Thomist Revival: What Next?" in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 95.
29. Donald Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral, ed. Jack W. Meiland and Michael Krausz (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 68.
30. For a clear and forceful statement, see Jeffrey Stout, Ethics after Babel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), p. 58.
31. For two recent attempts to do so, see Joseph M. Boyle, Jr., Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976);
32. and Vittorio Hösle, Die Krise der Gegenwart und die Vertantwortung der Philosophie (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), esp. pp. 143-78. I find flaws in the application that Boyle, Grisez, and Tollefsen make of self-referential argumentation, but they provide a helpful discussion of the method and its promise. Hösle makes even stronger claims about its capacity to provide a replacement for traditional forms of foundationalism. I should take care to note that drawing on self-referential argumentation in eithics need not involve the claim that all of ethics may be deduced from whatever transcendental norms are revealed through reflexive argumentation.