Customer Reviews

Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy

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This is a very illuminating work on MacIntyre's moral philosophy. The reader who has no familiarity with this ethicist will find a very clear introduction. Those who are already well-read in MacIntyre will find an interpreter who MacIntyre himself says has written "a splendid and measured exposition of my work and has discussed some major criticisms of it with unusual insight into what is at issue."

I have read every page of this work and find it remarkably lucid and engaging. I appreciate how he laid out the story of MacIntyre's own philsophical development at the beginning and then gave a very clear exposition of "tradition" and "rationality," key terms in MacIntyre's philosophy. Lutz also gives a careful exposition of major objections to MacIntyre's philosophy, i.e., one camp claims that he is relativistic while another argues that he is fideistic. Lutz offers impressive replies to these and other objections. I was especially impressed with how he dealt with Martha Nussbaum.

MacIntyre's thought has gone through many stages of development, from a fideistic Christian Marxist analytic philosopher, atheist Hume scholar, dissatisfied Aristotelian to a Catholic Thomist. If you need a map of this development, you could not do better than to read this work.

Lutz has written an extremely insightful and lucid exposition of Alasdair MacIntyre's account of tradition-constituted rationality and its relationship to the enlightenment, Nietzschian, Aristotelian ethical traditions.