First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues

The Aquinas Lecture in Philosophy #10

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Genres: Philosophy

82 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a British-American philosopher who contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology. MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is one of the most important works of Anglophone moral and political philosophy in the 20th century. He was senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. During his lengthy academic career, he also taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Boston University.

Reviews

[Vagabond of Letters, DLitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

9/10

This book contains nothing less than a distillation of the later MacIntyre, with a possible path toward the reconciliation of Nietzsche and Aquinas to boot.

[Ashley Ritchie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Again too short to allow for a fuller elaboration. Interesting points- MacIntyre has a deep knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas. One down side, a fault of many Thomists, is the heaviness and technicality of the language. It literally put me to sleep. And this was originally a lecture! But Aristotle makes for heavy reading.

I did not think the usuage of Nietzschean genealogy particularly radical or un-Thomistic; but such genealogies abound today in Thomistic circles, or rather from what I have seen, so perhaps I fail to appreciate the novelty of the suggestion. The strength of the lecture is its succinct defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic First Principles, Causality and Teleology. And the sharp critic of the impossibilty of postmetaphysical discourse.

The call to arms, or if you will the less bellicose call to dialogue (dialectic is not possible, so dialogue too is forestalled as long as our philosophical idioms share no common ground) with contemporary philosophy is encouraging- albeit the difficulties are not ignored. But the Thomistic position has the quiet, solid strength to point out the weaknessess of the contemporary project because it has not abandoned the principles that the contemporaries absolutely wish to reject. And the impossibilty of their task underscores the strength of the Thomistic position.

I wonder if the "theological turn" of at least continental philosophy is not in some sense a justification of MacIntyre's point?

[Hayden Lukas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well explained. It provides a framework that is helpful for understanding the main points of MacIntyre's career as a whole. A large focus of his is how Thomism can claim that it isn't part of the buffet-style philosophy where we can pick and choose what we believe (often by means of MacIntyre's appropriation of emotivism in After Virtue). The way Thomism can show this is through an appeal to first principles and how any evaluation of progress is based on the coherence between the often predetermined first principles and final ends.

Many systems of thought can provide such principles, but regularly do not account for--and event reject the idea of--coherence between first principles and final ends.

Ultimately, I think MacIntyre has shown me that even if "social constructivism" is not usually a positive but strictly critical and deconstructive approach, classical philosophy has always forgotten to admit that their theories are embedded and made manifest in social settings.

The terminus and grounding of philosophy can be in logical and ultimately metaphysical arguments. But if logic does not make room for human beings fallen and redeemed and restored to our proper place in the world, then social constructivism and scientism will continue (rightly and forcefully) poking holes in the credibility of a philosophy that approximates Aristotle or Aquinas.

Definitely turned me onto the Aquinas Lectures more generally, too.