Sublime

What values and practices can hold people together as the institutions in which they live fragment?

MacIntyre does not shrink from specifying the moral aspect: the large-scale manipulation of individuals. Not just manipulation of the way in which they organise their work, and thus their lives, but, more broadly, manipulation of the way they think about themselves and others.

We will see that much that goes under the banner of postmodern philosophy has one eye on ancient and medieval sources and constitutes a significant recovery of premodern ways of knowing, being, and doing.

belief, as we saw in the case of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, carries its own meaning and justification within itself. It is believed because it is believed.

he contends that philosophy has been overly concerned with knowledge (epistemology). This, he believes, turns all our relationships into instruments, alienating us from the world (to give him a little of Rosa’s language).

If moral reflection is dialectical—if it moves back and forth between the judgments we make in concrete situations and the principles that inform those judgments—it needs opinions and convictions, however partial and untutored, as ground and grist. A philosophy untouched by the shadows on the wall can only yield a sterile utopia.

One of the defects of all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they already know the conclusions to be reached.