The central argument of the book is that modern culture and philosophy has lost the capacity for moral reasoning ever since having abandoned Aristotle's "metaphysical biology" and the Christian conception of a human telos or end.
As MacIntyre wrote in his introduction, this book was written while he was an Aristotelian, but not yet a Thomist. classicĪlastair MacIntyre's After Virtue is by now a classic of 20th-century philosophical literature, which has the rare accomplishment of having attracted the interest of analytic philosophers, continental philosophers and social scientists, as well as Thomists and historians of medieval and ancient philosophy. While he recognizes that his conception of human beings as virtuous or vicious needed not only a metaphysical but also a biological grounding, ultimately he remains "committed to the thesis that it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity." In the third edition's prologue, MacIntyre revisits the central theses of the book and concludes that, although he has learned a great deal and has supplemented and refined his theses and arguments in other works, he has "as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions" of this book. While the individual chapters are wide-ranging, once pieced together, they comprise a penetrating and focused argument about the price of modernity. In this classic work, Alasdair MacIntyre examines the historical and conceptual roots of the idea of virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence in personal and public life, and offers a tentative proposal for its recovery. Now, 25 years later, the University of Notre Dame Press is pleased to release the third edition of After Virtue, which includes a new prologue: " After Virtue After a Quarter of a Century".
Since that time, the book has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages and has sold over 100,000 copies. When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy.
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