Kelvin Knight

Practices: The Aristotelian Concept

Abstract Social practices are widely regarded as the bedrock that turns one’s spade, beneath which no further justifications for action can be found. Followers of the later Wittgenstein might therefore be right to agree with Heideggerians and neo-pragmatists that philosophy’s traditional search for first principles should be abandoned. However, the concept of practices has played a very different role in the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. Having once helped lead the assault on foundationalism in both moral and social philosophy, his elaboration of an Aristotelian’ concept of practices in After Virtue has since led him to embrace a metaphysical teleology. This paper attempts to outline MacIntyre’s Aristotelian concept, and to identify its ethical, political and philosophical significance.

After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx

Abstract Philosophical tradition has been challenged by those who would have us look to our own practice, and to nothing beyond. In this, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is followed by the politics of Hannah Arendt, for whom the tradition of political philosophy terminated with Karl Marx’s theorization of labour. This challenge has been met by Alasdair MacIntyre, for whom the young Marx’s reconceptualization of production as a social activity can inform an Aristotelianism that addresses our shared practices in traditional, teleological terms. Looking to the social nature of our practices orientates us to common goods, to the place of those goods in our own lives, and to their place within political communities. MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelian tradition has Heideggerian and other philosophical rivals, but he argues that it represents our best way of theorizing practice.

Paul Hirst's Pluralism: A Response to Mark Wenman

In a recent article in Political Studies, Mark Wenman advances a critique of Paul Hirsts theory of associative democracy. In response, we argue that Wenman overstates the importance of G. D. H. Cole in the formation of Hirsts theory, that he therefore misrepresents important aspects of Hirsts argument, and that, as it stands, his own theory of ‘agonistic pluralism’ is less the ‘alternative’ he claims than an observation about the ineradicability of social conflict that Hirst would have regarded as true, but sought to move beyond in thinking about how a viable pluralism could be politically constructed and sustained in modern societies.

MacIntyre's Progress

Alasdair MacIntyre has recently had published two books of selected essays, a study of the phenomenologist Edith Stein, a third edition of After Virtue, and an extensive collection of his early Marxist writings. These are reviewed, along with two recently published commentaries upon his work. The recent reinterpretation and revival of interest in that work receives much support from most of these publications. Central to this reinterpretation is the concept of practices, which MacIntyre first elaborated in After Virtue. His recent work indicates how that concept may be further developed in the direction of a politically radical moral realism.

Aristotelianism versus Communitarianism

Abstract Alasdair MacIntyre is an Aristotelian critic of communitarianism, which he understands to be committed to the politics of the capitalist and bureaucratic nation-state. The politics he proposes instead is based in the resistance to managerial institutions of what he calls ‘practices’, because these are schools of virtue. This shares little with the communitarianism of a Taylor or the Aristotelianism of a Gadamer. Although practices require formal institutions. MacIntyre opposes such conservative politics. Conventional accounts of a ‘liberal-communitarian debate’ in political philosophy face the dilemma that Alasdair MacIntyre, often identified as a paradigmatic communitarian, has consistently and emphatically repudiated this characterization. Although neo-Aristotelianism is sometimes seen as a philosophical warrant for communitarian politics, MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism is opposed to communitarianism. This paper explores the rationale of that opposition.

What's the good of post-analytic philosophy?

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moores critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradleys identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essays second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyres account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianisms conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophys dilemma about the human good.

Agency and Ethics, Past and Present

Chris Wickham’s work appears to be motivated by an implicit ethic of ‘protagonism’ or praxis. This essay attempts to explicate that ethic. It argues that his work indicates why and how historical materialism, having abandoned historical teleology, should be combined with a teleological ethics.*