After MacIntyre : Philosophy, Culture, Ethics and Politics

ABSTRACT

Engaging with how different generations of philosophers carry the formative influence of their teachers, I expose difficulties Ernst Cassirer's Enlightenment humanism created for his philosophy coming to terms with the Holocaust, even with his more generous sense of the mythical and non‐rational. I contrast this with Alasdair MacIntyre's sustained criticisms of liberalism and his anti‐capitalism as part of his critique of Enlightenment rationalism. In After Virtue and later, he develops his Thomistic Aristotelianism, showing how morality is historically and culturally woven into the fabric of communities, organised also, as he later acknowledges, through class, race, ethnic and colonial relations of power and violence. Analytic moral philosophy too often cuts morality off from its roots in history and tradition, thus limiting our visions of ourselves as ethical humans.