Part of Cambridge's Contemporary Philosophy in Focus series, this volume brings together seven essays on the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. All but one of these essays focus on MacIntyre's thought from After Virtue (AV) (1981) onwards, though in almost every one there is an attempt to connect these mature writings with his earlier work both in ethics and meta-ethics and in the social sciences.

In "MacIntyre on History and Philosophy" Gordon Graham attributes to MacIntyre three theses concerning the relationship of philosophy to history. The first is that philosophy must attend to social history if it is to achieve its own ends; the second is that philosophical inquiry can affect the social world of which it is a part; and the third is that "the adequacy of philosophical thought is itself a product of history" (12). Graham concludes by suggesting that the last of these theses is belied by MacIntyre's most recent work Dependent Rational Animals (DRA), in which his treatment of the ethical significance of human dependency and vulnerability "derives not from historical but from ethological investigation…and [seems] in fact wholly lacking in the spirit that declared history to be essential to moral understanding" (36). So philosophy, on Graham's view, cannot have the dependence on history that he thinks MacIntyre says it must have, since MacIntyre's own positive work seems ahistorical and based in "a biological nature that human beings share" (37).

Jean Porter presents a detailed account of MacIntyre's idea of "tradition" in "Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre" beginning with its origin as "practice" in AV and ending with the defense of Thomism in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (TRV). Porter views MacIntyre's tradition-bound rationality as a "plausible resolution of key questions in contemporary philosophical discussions" which at once maintains a commitment to robust conceptions of truth and rationality without basing such conceptions on a "widely discredited foundationalism" (53). The two real objections that Porter raises to his approach are common but substantive ones: in the first place she questions whether MacIntyre's historical depictions-specifically of the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? ( WJ)-are accurate; and secondly whether tradition-bound rationality requires for its right functioning the kind of "authority" that MacIntyre seems to think it does (especially in TRV).

In "MacIntyre in the Province of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences" Stephen P. Turner undertakes to explain the genesis of MacIntyre's idea of tradition-bound rationality as emerging from his participation in disputes in the social sciences, especially those concerning (roughly) problems in the fact-value distinction and questions about normativity that arise therefrom. Turner's piece is unique in focusing upon MacIntyre's work before AV and in treating other essays which are not usually discussed at length. While Turner's reconstruction of MacIntyre's development is persuasive, his main objection-that MacIntyre's "identifications of what is to be explained do the work of excluding rivals" (91)-could be more clearly presented. Nonetheless, this is one of the two or three most idiosyncratic and suggestive pieces in this book.

In "Modern(ist) Moral Philosophy and MacIntyrean Critique" J.L.A. Garcia examines five claims he believes MacIntyre makes against modern forms of moral philosophy. Modern moral philosophy is too abstract (98); based upon a distinction between facts and values (99); encourages the fragmentation of the subject (100); pits self-interest against the common good (100); and suffers from a kind of false-consciousness (101). Garcia then looks at MacIntyre's attempt to overcome such moral philosophy through the tradition of Thomism. This includes a helpful discussion (104-106) of how MacIntyre is like, and unlike, the "geneaologist" in his criticism of certain Enlightenment concepts.

David Solomon, in "MacIntyre and Contemporary Moral Philosophy," contextualizes MacIntyre within a larger story of 20th century ethics, focusing both upon the meta-ethical debates that dominated the first half of that century, and the revival in normative ethics following Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). In the first instance Solomon examines MacIntyre's M.A. thesis and other relatively early writings to illustrate how MacIntyre fit into the prescriptivist-naturalist wars; in the next he places the "After Virtue Project" in dialogue with other current ethical programs, such as deontology (Rawls, Nagel), consequentialism (Parfit), and what Solomon calls "anti-theory," meaning here principally the work of Bernard Williams. Solomon's piece will be of most use for students taking a contemporary ethics course since it is written in the vocabulary of current analytic philosophy and provides a helpful, albeit simplified, outline of the current ethical debates in that field.

In "MacIntyre's Political Philosophy" Mark C. Murphy treats MacIntyre's political thought as it develops from AV onwards. MacIntyre's thought in this area is directed against the notion of "the state." The state, on his view, "is unable to justify itself without bearing a substantive conception of the good, but the state is entirely unfit to bear a substantive conception of the good" (152). Hence MacIntyre appeals to the "politics of local community" as an alternative to statism. Murphy questions whether MacIntyre's criticisms of the state are fair, and he also questions whether MacIntyre's appeal to "local community" is not at best idealistic, at worst incoherent. An added bonus in this essay is Murphy's brief, but helpful, treatment of MacIntyre on natural law and natural rights. Murphy's explanation of how MacIntyre can believe in natural law while thinking that natural rights are "nonsense on stilts" is important both for our understanding of MacIntyre and for getting clear on how these two concepts, so often confusedly mingled together, are crucially different.

In the concluding essay, "MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity," Terry Pinkard offers an unorthodox reading of MacIntyre wherein he is best understood as a post-Kantian thinker who accepts the "primacy of practical reason" but who sees that reason as needing to be embedded in a social practice in order to avoid both incoherence and individualism (194). In short, Pinkard tries to make MacIntyre into Hegel. There are many problems with this, but also many intriguing possibilities. One problem resides in Pinkard's misreading of MacIntyre. MacIntyre does not, contra Pinkard, believe in "rights" (181, 189), nor does he think that "a new Saint Benedict" would necessarily be a "Mr. or Mrs. Benedict" who is supposed to preserve "the virtues appropriate to an individualist way of life by fostering the social structures that make our proper mutual dependencies apparent and rational" (197). (One is tempted to respond that, for MacIntyre, there are by definition no virtues to an individualist way of life.) Still, Pinkard brings to the surface MacIntyre's latent Hegelianism and does so in a forceful way. This essay is sure to provoke debate.

Overall this volume does a nice job of presenting an introduction to the work of MacIntyre. At times the essays seem a bit repetitive (and this is to be expected in an introductory volume), but all of them seem to have something to say. Finally, it would have been nice to have seen a really critical piece-but again, this perhaps lies outside the scope of the volume's intention.

William Junker, The University of Chicago

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