within the Thomistic scheme and what the relationship of that understanding to the claims of encyclopaedia and genealogy has turned out to be.
This chapter concerned about how to decide between apparently incompatible and incommensurable conceptions of the world. McIntyre poses that question in such a way that it is very difficult to argue or to develop a system to judge a tradition from the outside. He opens first with a strong claim of incommensurability. But then uses some modern philosophy of science (Feyerabed, Kuhn,etc) to suggest that there is some possibility of going beyond the particular standpoint or rather to find oneself in the middle of two standpoints and then developing a justification of the new on the basis of problems of the old. So he finds Aquinas as a student and then as a teacher to be the ideal person taking up this challenge. He claims to have done this by taking seriously the Aristotelian position of the human from his or her position in the world. But then retains the Augustinian goal for the framework to which the student must aspire - enlist in a new-platonic ideal.
