Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Quotes

“The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“Indeed, one of the functions of the structures of normality is that by making it unnecessary for almost everybody almost all the time to provide justifications for what they are doing or are about to do, they relieve us of what would otherwise be an intolerable burden.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment … to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those cultural and social particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“This type of translation characteristic of modernity generates in turn its own misunderstanding of tradition. The original locus of that misunderstanding is the kind of introductory Great Books or Humanities course, so often taught in liberal arts colleges, in which, in abstraction from historical context and with all sense of the complexities of linguistic particularity removed by translation, a student moves in rapid succession through Homer, Sophocles, two dialogues of Plato, Virgil, Augustine, the Inferno, Machiavelli, Hamlet [. . .] If one fails to recognize that what this provides is not and cannot be a re-introduction to the culture of past traditions but is a tour through a museum of texts, each rendered contextless and therefore other than its original by being placed on a cultural pedestal, then it is natural enough to suppose that, were we to achieve consensus as to a set of such texts, the reading of them would reading of them would reintegrate modern students into what is thought of as our tradition, that unfortunate fictitious amalgam sometimes known as the "Judeo-Christian tradition" and sometimes as "Western values." The writings of self-proclaimed contemporary conservatives [. . .] turn out to be one more stage in modernity's cultural deformation of our relationship to the past.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“There is no practical rationality then without the virtues of character. The vicious argue unsoundly from false premises about the good, while the akratic ignores the sound arguments available to him. Only the virtuous are able to argue soundly to those conclusions which are their actions […]”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“[…] This kind of philosophy is, when conducted in self-aware fashion, what some of its most acute exponents always said that it was, a way of clarifying issues and alternatives but not if providing grounds for conviction on matters of any substance.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

“The book review pages of those journals are the graveyards of constructive academic philosophy, and any doubts as to whether rational consensus might not after all be achievable on modern academic moral philosophy can be put to rest by reading them through regularly.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?