Abstract

Professor MacIntyre has here collected twenty-three of his essays. They range in topics from discussions of psychoanalysis to the relation between reasons and causes in accounts of human action. Indeed, the very range of such issues is part of the point of the book itself. In part 1 of the book, MacIntyre has collected some of the articles he has written over the last fifteen years or so for Encounter, New York Review of Books, and Partisan Review; in part 2, the more traditionally philosophic pieces which first appeared in Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Journal of Philosophy; by collecting both sets of essays within one set of covers, he has tried to make a point about the relation between such apparently different intellectual contexts. Most broadly, that point has to do with the common problem of "ideology" as it is found in each arena, whether as some explicit, historically achieved "self-image" by means of which individuals struggle "to provide the light that our individual and social lives need", or as the problem of the general role beliefs, reasons, desires, and the like should be said to play in human action, in what way such factors are related to causal explanations of action, and how decisions about such questions affect any view of what a social science is. MacIntyre believes that these somewhat more practical and more theoretical contexts need to be thought together, first because reflection on current, dominant ideologies greatly needs the benefit of "detailed, analytical conceptual inquiries," and because that analysis itself has often paid insufficient attention to its own broader, historical, even ideological context, and the effect such a context can have on methodology. Thus, while it is of the utmost importance to analyze thoroughly and as clearly as possible the language of morals, the methodology of that analysis alone cannot help in determining whether such a language is indeed the language only within which moral discourse can take place, and might also fail to appreciate historical alterations in the meaning of important terms.