The Flourishing of Alasdair MacIntyre

In Conversations on Ethics (2009), the discussion that Alex Voorhoeve has with Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps as good an entry into the vast corpus of the latter's thinking as anything available in his own words of comparable length.

In the discussion, Prof. MacIntyre explains how and why he came to regard Aristotelian philosophy (supplemented by Thomas Aquinas) as essentially correct.  I am most interested in the Scottish philosopher's idea of human flourishing, or excellence -- what Aristotle called eudaimonia -- and its relation to practical intelligence, or phronēsis. This topic, the intersection of eudaimonia and phronēsis, of flourishing and practical wisdom, is particularly relevant to this blog.  Its title is, after all, Feeding Phronēsis.

My reading of MacIntyre has broadened and deepened (and I hope been more finely tuned) since I first began this post two years ago.  The draft has lain in abeyance for that long despite my intent to return to and polish it.  Rather than start afresh now in exploring Prof. MacIntyre on practical rationality, let me revisit what he has to say principally in his particularly thorough conversation with Voorhoeve.  In due course in the future I am sure that I will return to reflect more critically and constructively on other intersections of MacIntyre's thinking and my own, especially on practical rationality.

At present, what follows is in many respects my attempt to assemble critical elements of MacIntyre's account of flourishing and practical rationality.  It is largely descriptive because it is largely an exercise in mental organization.  I find compelling in MacIntyre's discussion the limits of moral rules, the necessity of wisdom, the embeddedness of human flourishing in practices of communities and traditions, the unavoidability of dependency on others (especially friends), and the storied nature of flourishing as a quest.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 2: Francis Hutcheson -- British Sense Theorists

In the previous post that introduced this series on the British moral sense theorists, I noted that these eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers raise fascinating questions about the role of emotions, or passions, in moral judgments.  Some went so far as to posit a separate moral sense, a distinct faculty that engages those subjects, persons, actions, or thoughts that we judge to pertain to the moral sphere. One of those moral sense theorists is Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746).