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God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition [Hardcover]

Alasdair MacIntyre
4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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Book Description

May 16, 2009 074254429X 978-0742544291
'What does it mean to be a human being?' Given this perennial question, Alasdair MacIntyre, one of America's preeminent philosophers, presents a compelling argument on the necessity and importance of philosophy. Because of a need to better understand Catholic philosophical thought, especially in the context of its historical development and realizing that philosophers interact within particular social and cultural situations, MacIntyre offers this brief history of Catholic philosophy. Tracing the idea of God through different philosophers' engagement of God and how this engagement has played out in universities, MacIntyre provides a valuable, lively, and insightful study of the disintegration of academic disciplines with knowledge. MacIntyre then demonstrates the dangerous implications of this happening and how universities can and ought to renew a shared understanding of knowledge in their mission. This engaging work will be a benefit and a delight to all readers.

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God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition + After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition + Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
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Editorial Reviews

Review

While not a work of academic philosophy—MacIntyre intends it for undergraduate seniors and first-year graduate students—this book can profitably be read by any reader of First Things. In fact, it should be so read, as either an introduction or a refresher to the great tradition, and then passed on to a friend. (First Things 2010-07-01)

Without ostentation he displays his great learning, pointing out, almost in passing, that what many an undergraduate thinks is the height of modern philosophy was actually knocked out by Augustine more than a millennium beforehand. (Comment Magazine: Cardus 2011-06-24)

MacIntyre has offered a book that serves its intended non-specialist audience well…. He explains the Catholic philosophical tradition in a way that will be accessible to intelligent readers and shows how the tradition truly is philosophical…. MacIntyre's contributions are welcome and go some distance to showing how theism is ultimately more satisfying from a strictly philosophical standpoint…. A useful starting point for those many students and lay people who have been denied the very sort of education that MacIntyre here espouses, including and especially within our Catholic universities. (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly)

Fascinating. (Logos: Journal Of Eastern Christian Studies)

MacIntyre incorporates . . . his view that modern university education has become fragmented and absent of any inquiry into the relationship between the disciplines, leaving little place for theology or philosophy. (Publishers Weekly 2009-04-01)

This compact book will be very useful to undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars of the philosophy of religions, and for clergy. Highly recommended. (CHOICE 2009-11-01)

MacIntyre thinks that lay Catholics, especially those engaged in current controversies that make philosophical claims, should know something about the history and tradition of Catholic philosophy. His account pivots on St. Thomas Aquinas, of course. Before him are Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Islamic and Jewish influences, and other topics. (Research Book News 2009-08-01)

There is a prophetic quality to much of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, a quality present in his new book, God, Philosophy, Universities. . . . MacIntyre has offered a framework for moral discourse that tries to reconcile the claims of historicism with the need for objectivity. . . . MacIntyre brought us along on an extraordinary intellectual journey. (Commonweal 2010-03-01)

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the world’s leading moral philosophers and author of the classic volume After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, would give academic theology a central role. In his most recent book, God, Philosophy, Universities, he appeals to John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University (1854) to argue that philosophy, and its close ally, theology, make a university what it should be – a 'universe' of knowledge. Universities today, MacIntyre complains, keep their disciplines separate. Hence students are being trained up for specialised job opportunities rather than for life, while research programmes fail to make connections across the broad span of neighbouring subjects. He advocates that theology should listen to, and be in constant conversation with, every other academic discipline if universities are to fulfil their function as places where students and teachers explore what it means to be human. (Financial Times 2010-04-01)

MacIntyre indicts the university for its lack of integration, the disconnections among the disciplines, and the intellectual disregard of one discipline for another. (The Chronicle Review)

One could not wish for a better statement of either the nature and promise of Catholic philosophy or its perilous position in the contemporary university. (Theology)

MacIntyre is the master craftsman of the guild of the Catholic philosophical tradition; we are his apprentices, and studying his masterful narration of this tradition's history...is our first task. (Modern Age 2011-09-01)

Beautifully and crisply written, and historically based, this book makes an insightful case for a certain slant on Catholic philosophy. Worth the price of admission, even by itself, is the first-chapter paragraph that ends '... the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God.' (Harry J. Gensler, John Carroll University)

A fascinating narrative of the development of Christian and especially of Catholic philosophy, conveying a powerful argument for the necessity of Catholic philosophy and a forceful statement of the challenges facing Catholic philosophers—and the universities that they inhabit—today. (Arthur Madigan, Boston College)

This is MacIntyre at his best: relating intellectual and cultural history while engaging philosophically with core ideas and arguments. Here the focus is on the interweaving of religious ideas and philosophical enquiry through the development of Catholic Christianity, leading to a challenge to Catholic thinkers to enter more fully into philosophy, and to universities to reacquaint themselves with their ancient vocation. MacIntyre has set a new foundation for discussion and further study. (John Haldane, University of St. Andrews and the Pontifical Council for Culture)

This book clearly explains the fundamental problems and the historical background for the philosophical inquiry about God and how human beings are related to God. This book is essential reading both for seasoned philosophers (teachers) and for relative beginners in the field of philosophy (students). It enables the reader to step back from his or her specialized work, and see how the study of philosophy is first and foremost what its etymology says, a pursuit of wisdom. (Patrick Lee, Franciscan University of Steubenville)

God, philosophy, universities is both a tour de monde and a tour de force. Alasdair MacIntyre provides a swift, personal but not at all tendentious history of where philosophy has come from, where it has been, and what it has become, with special reference to its role in the university. (Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame)

In his accessible new book, the influential philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre shows how a distinctively Catholic understanding of the university might restore even to the secular university, a sense of purpose, of the nature of academic inquiry as ordered to a unified conception of truth, a conception that gives due credit both to the diversity of the parts of the curriculum and to the ways in which those parts complement one another. (Thomas Hibbs, Baylor University)

About the Author

Alasdair MacIntyre is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He has written 16 books, including After Virtue, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, A Short History of Ethics, and, more recently, Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 200 pages
  • Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (May 16, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 074254429X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0742544291
  • Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 0.7 x 9.5 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #708,491 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alasdair MacIntyre is Senior Research Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame. He is the author of several bestselling books, including After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and A Short History of Ethics (a Routledge Classic).

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
75 of 77 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Tremendous, tremens, makes you shake July 16, 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a wonderful book, it makes you wonder, almost a spiritual, religious experience. It is notable for its clarity, brevity, and fairness to those philosophers with whom MacIntyre disagrees (in that, he is like Aquinas.)

The book presents itself as the summary of a "History of Catholic Philosophy' course given at Notre Dame, and those who took that course were blessed. Although it would serve as a fine introduction to Catholic philosophy, it is also a good, compact reminder for those who have already studied that material. I found myself not only enjoying the thread of Catholic philosophy, compared with secular philosophy and Catholic theology, but I obtained new insights on several individual thinkers.

For instance, I was not aware (or forgot) the extent to which Descartes had borrowed the 'cogito ergo sum' from Augustine. I never knew how much John Henry Newman depended on Joseph Butler. MacIntyre underscores the sad fact that just as the Enlightenment philosophers flourished, Catholics philosophy became moribund, which explains why we are still trying to 'catch up' with critiquing the modern philosophy which underscored the Enlightenment and modernity.

In conclusion, MacIntyre focuses on (St.) Edith Stein and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), especially his encyclical letter "Fides et Ratio," Faith and Reason. For true, and even orthodox, Catholic thinking, one must not choose between a rationalistic philosophy, or a fideistic, fundamentalistic faith, but it must be a both/and.

And in the contemporary era, Catholic universities have tried too hard to 'keep up the with the [secular university] Jones,' while not trying to integrate the wisdom gleaned from the various physical, economic and psychological sciences, contrary to the Catholic-founded universities of the middle ages, and the thinking of Cardinal Newman. If and when they do not, they are not helpful toward their original mission, of evangelization through scholarship. Highly recommended.
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68 of 73 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars MacIntyre for the (college educated) masses May 24, 2009
Format:Hardcover
This book is largely a written version of MacIntyre's Notre Dame course on the topic. As such, it increases the reach of his reading public considerably. It is superbly written for this wider audience. Although everyone who is able should still go on to read his standards, e.g. After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals, this new book encapsulates essential MacIntyrean insights into the nature of virtue, its connection with the pursuit of the meaning of life, the essential connectedness of various academic disciplines, the centrality of intellectual tradition, the relationship between our moral condition and our philosophical outlook, and the relationship of philosophy to theology, among many others. That is, it demonstrates the profundity, yes and the wisdom, of MacIntyre's mature philosophical perspective. Another excellent book by the most important social and ethical philosopher of our time.
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38 of 41 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars After Philosophy April 3, 2010
Format:Hardcover
When Alasdair MacIntyre was twenty-three years old, he wrote this remarkable passage:

When the sacred and the secular are divided, then religion becomes one more department of human life, one activity among others. . . . Only a religion which is a way of living in every sphere either deserves to or can hope to survive. For the task of religion is to help us to see the secular as sacred, the world as under God. When the sacred and the secular are separated, then ritual becomes an end not to the hallowing of the world, but in itself. Likewise if our religion is fundamentally irrelevant to our politics, then we are recognising the political as a realm outside the reign of God. To divide the sacred from the secular is to recognise God's action only within the narrowest limits.

What is particularly remarkable about this passage is its robust theological claims, for not only was MacIntyre much less open to things theistic at this time--this passage comes from his first book written as an atheist Marxist--but also his later work as a Catholic Thomist evinced a strong commitment to strictly philosophical discourse: "I am by trade a moral philosopher, not at all a theologian, and certainly not an exponent of Christian ethics."

MacIntyre's life work has been that of a philosophical doctor, diagnosing the intellectual maladies of modernity and prescribing medicine for their deepest root causes, causes detectable and treatable by the philosopher's instruments, hence MacIntyre's philosophical diagnosis of modern culture in 1979: "There is largely lacking any conception of political life as being the pursuit of a common good which transcends all partial interests and which can be realized by the individual only through his participation in political life." The prognosis follows: escalating political corruption, moral turpitude, and philosophical anarchy, of which the root causes are the Enlightenment's rejection of the Aristotelian philosophical tradition and post-Enlightenment western culture's having inherited, embodied, and furthered this rejection. Finally, there is this prescription: the reestablishment of the Aristotelian tradition in modern western culture.

In After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre gave us what is arguably the most sophisticated and radical philosophical critique of and alternative to modern moral and political philosophy and practice ever penned by a modern philosopher. However, in none of these works does MacIntyre return to or develop his distinctly religious and theological diagnosis of and prescription for the sick moral culture of the late 1970s. Instead, MacIntyre would go on to articulate his initial supernatural and theological diagnosis in purely natural and philosophical terms: the divorce of, not religion, but the good from everyday life; the separation of, not the sacred, but communal authority from the secular; the cleaving of, not Faith, but a determining telos from reason. In the last book of his trilogy, MacIntyre provides an eminently philosophical justification for the superiority of the Thomistic tradition:

The conception of truth embodied in the scheme requires that claims for truth on its behalf and on behalf of the judgments in which it is expressed commit those making them to hold that when that scheme encounters alternative standpoints making alternative and incompatible, even incommensurable, claims, Aquinas's dialectical synthesis will be able to render those standpoints intelligible in a way that cannot be achieved by their own adherents from their own point of view and to distinguish their defects and limitations from their insights and merits in such a way as to explain the occurrence of what they themselves would have to take to be their defects and limitations at points at which their own explanatory capacities are resourceless.

In his new book, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition, MacIntyre has developed and, in a sense, completed his life's work of vindicating the Catholic philosophical tradition by writing a philosophically and theologically informed history of that tradition. After decades of rigorous exploration of and grappling with the philosophical questions and problems of the Catholic philosophical tradition, MacIntyre's history reveals that these questions and problems can only be adequately and accurately answered and understood in their fullest meaning from the vantage point of revealed theology:

Part of the gift of Christian faith is to enable us to identify accurately where the line between faith and reason is to be drawn, something that cannot be done from the standpoint of reason, but only from that of faith. Reason therefore needs Christian faith, if it is to do its own work well. Reason without Christian faith is always reason informed by some other faith, characteristically an unacknowledged faith, one that renders its adherents liable to error. (152-153)

Continuing his "theological turn" that began with his book on the philosopher- saint, Edith Stein, and his interpretative essays on Fides et Ratio, God, Philosophy, Universities might be described as a work after philosophy. MacIntyre's succinct yet rich narration of the history of the Catholic philosophical tradition reveals the superiority of this tradition in all its dialectical deftness, cultural adaptability, and synthetic richness. In his prior works, MacIntyre aimed his critical eye at the decrepit state of moral philosophy, cultural discourse, and political life in the West, offering us as a way back to health the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition.

In this work, however, MacIntyre is more concerned with the internal state of this tradition itself, and especially with that institution most indispensable for its preservation, sustenance, and development--indeed for its very survival--the Catholic university. Since theory and practice are inextricably related, as the student of MacIntyre knows, any discussion of Catholic philosophy must include its institutional analogue:

Philosophy is not just a matter of propositions affirmed or denied and of arguments advanced and critically evaluated, but of philosophers in particular social and cultural situations interacting with each other in their affirmations and denials, in their argumentative wrangling, so that the social forms and institutionalizations of their interactions are important and none more so than those university settings that have shaped philosophical conversation, both to its benefit and to its detriment. (1)

Just as the interminable and fruitless quarreling that constitutes contemporary public moral discourse, and the "civil war by other means" that is western, democratic political life indicate a profound problem in contemporary moral and political theory, so the secularization, careerism, specialization, fragmentation, and politicization of the contemporary Catholic university, in obeisance to its illegitimate, secularist offspring, indicates something radically wrong with its theoretical foundation. Thus, we need a reappropriation, rejuvenation, and rearticulation of the Catholic philosophical tradition, as well as a refounding of the Catholic university firmly and immovably on this tradition.

According to MacIntyre, Catholic universities ¬en masse have uncritically adopted and imitated the secular-research model, in which authentic worship of and robust discourse about God has no institutional or curricular place--religious studies and community service take the place of the Catholic Mass and the queen of the sciences. Philosophy becomes "just one more specialized form of academic activity, important perhaps for those whose interests incline them toward that sort of thing, but something that can be safely ignored by the huge majority of humankind, that is in no way an indispensable part of an adequate education" (170-171). However, the heart of the Catholic philosophical tradition, though not reducible to it, is the Faith it serves and is enlightened by, for philosophy is its perpetual interlocutor, companion, and student. Indeed, philosophy is born from the existentially unstable encounter with the mystery of religious belief: "Philosophy is in the offing for the first time when someone asks whether something hitherto commonly and unquestioningly taken to be a religious truth is in fact true" (9).

The diagnosis of 2009, then, is that the Catholic philosophical tradition and university are in bad shape, with risk of death unless something drastic is done. What, then, is MacIntyre's prescription? In a word: God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition! What best revitalizes any craft gone into disuse is sometimes just the existence of a mastercraftsman who is willing and able to teach apprentices. MacIntyre is the mastercraftsman of the guild of the Catholic philosophical tradition; we are his apprentices, and studying his masterful narration of this tradition's history, centering on St. Thomas Aquinas as its culminating figure, and the tension between religious belief and philosophical enquiry as its informing and enlivening problem, is our first task.

But why study the past when our most urgent problems are in the present? Why not engage in philosophical polemics against the enemies of faith and reason here and now? MacIntyre answers,

Our present philosophical problems and our present philosophical resources are what they are only because of what they have become in the course of enquiries by and debates among our predecessors, and they are only fully intelligible when they are understood as issuing from that history. (169)

Fair enough. Read more ›
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