Alasdair Macintyre Quotes

Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror

~ Alasdair Macintyre

History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture

~ Alasdair Macintyre

The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil. Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.

~ Alasdair Macintyre

Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche's thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right.

~ Alasdair Macintyre