Books by Alasdair MacIntyre

	Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative Cambridge University Press (November 14, 2016). 332 pages. Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.
	God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition Continuum Intl Pub Group (August 25, 2009). 200 pages. MacIntyre gives the reader an extremely perceptive account of the role of religion in modern culture and society as a whole. Three convictions underlie this book. The first is that an educated Catholic laity needs to understand a good deal more about Catholic philosophical thought than it does now. The warring partisans on the great issues that engage our culture and politics presuppose the truth of some philosophical theses and the falsity of others. Second, argues MacIntyre, Catholic philosophy is best understood historically, as a continuing conversation through the centuries, in which we turn and return to the most important voices from our past. Third, philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied but of philosophers in particular cultural and social situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumentative wrangling. This is the context for a book of vital importance and interest for anyone involved with education in a religious context. But from someone with MacIntyre's authority and reputation, the reader can expect something extremely perceptive about the role of religion in modern culture and society as a whole. The reader will not be disappointed.
	Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays Vol. 2 Cambridge University Press (June 12, 2006). 252 pages. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most creative and important philosophers working today. This volume presents a selection of his classic essays on ethics and politics collected together for the first time, focussing particularly on the themes of moral disagreement, moral dilemmas, and truthfulness and its importance. The essays range widely in scope, from Aristotle and Aquinas and what we need to learn from them, to our contemporary economic and social structures and the threat which they pose to the realization of the forms of ethical life. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology.
	The Tasks of Philosophy: Volume 1: Selected Essays Cambridge University Press (June 12, 2006). 246 pages. How should we respond when some of our basic beliefs are put into question? What makes a human body distinctively human? Why is truth an important good? These are among the questions explored in this 2006 collection of essays by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most creative and influential philosophers working today. Ten of MacIntyre's most influential essays written over almost thirty years are collected together here for the first time. They range over such topics as the issues raised by different types of relativism, what it is about human beings that cannot be understood by the natural sciences, the relationship between the ends of life and the ends of philosophical writing, and the relationship of moral philosophy to contemporary social practice. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology.
	Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue Bloomsbury Academic; 1 edition (August 26, 2006). 208 pages. MacIntyre is one of the major British philosophers of the post-war years. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism. Edith Stein was an intellectual of considerable importance in the period between the two World Wars, also canonised as a Saint. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, she died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Stein's published essays focused largely on the structure of the person and a careful articulation of the essential nature of community and its basis in our nature as persons. MacIntyre looks at Stein as both a theologian and philosopher, and reveals many of the fundamental issues in both disciplines.
	Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (The Paul Carus Lectures) Open Court (May 18, 2001). 180 pages. To flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. In this book, a leading moral philosopher presents a comparison of humans to other animals and explores the impact of these virtues.
	Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition: Being Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh in 1988 University of Notre Dame Press; Revised ed. edition (May 1997). 241 pages. Alasdair MacIntyre—whom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"—here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris. The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.
	Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Univ of Notre Dame Pr; First edition (March 1988). 410 pages. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, the sequel to After Virtue, is a persuasive argument of there not being rationality that is not the rationality of some tradition. MacIntyre examines the problems presented by the existence of rival traditions of inquiry in the cases of four major philosophers: Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Hume.
	After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory University of Notre Dame Press; 3rd edition (March 6, 2007). 312 pages. When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Newsweek called it “a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world.” Since that time, the book has been translated into more than fifteen foreign languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies. Now, twenty-five years later, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, which includes a new prologue “After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century.” 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. While he recognizes that his conception of human beings as virtuous or vicious needed not only a metaphysical but also a biological grounding, ultimately 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.”
	First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Aquinas Lecture) Marquette Univ Pr; First Edition edition (April 1990). 69 pages.
	A Short History of Ethics University of Notre Dame Press; 1 edition (January 15, 1998). 304 pages. A Short History of Ethics is a significant contribution written by one of the most important living philosophers. For the second edition Alasdair MacIntyre has included a new preface in which he examines his book “thirty years on” and considers its impact. It remains an important work, ideal for all students interested in ethics and morality.