Six Core Concepts on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

One of the thinkers whose work I teach regularly in my Ethics classes is Alasdair MacIntyre.  In addition to his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy", I like to introduce my students to portions of MacIntyre's highly influential work, After Virtue.  Years back, I produced some core concept videos on chapters 2 and 3 of that work. 

Recently, I created a sequence of videos on another chapter of After Virtue - number 14, "The Nature of the Virtues" - that often gets anthologized and discussed.  MacIntyre sets out several conceptions of the virtues, corresponding to different types of moral philosophies, foundational conceptions, and cultures and institutions.  He zeroes in on a conception that he views as broadly Aristotelian, and elaborates it in relation to what has become one of his most distinctive and famous ideas - that of practices.

Here are those six core concept videos focused on the main ideas, distinctions, and arguments of the chapter:

• Differing Accounts of the Virtues
• What is a Practice?
• Practices, Standards, Rules, and Goods
• Justice, Courage, and Honesty
• Virtues and Institutions
• How MacIntyre's Account Is Aristotelian

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One Sentence Summary on Aristotle and Anger

As the current editor of Stoicism Today, and a frequenter of various social media Stoicism-focused groups, I wind up wading into quite a few discussions bearing not only on Stoic philosophy, but on practical philosophy more generally, particularly when the conversation turns to two other matters that I do quite a bit of work on - Aristotelian philosophy, and the emotion of anger.

In the course of one of those discussions in the Facebook Stoicism Group, an interlocutor asked me if I could provide a one-sentence summary of Aristotle's position on anger.  If that was something easy to do, I would have done so right then and there.  But since it isn't I decided I'd put some thought into it and then provide an answer later.  And that's exactly what I'm doing now.

Aristotle's position on anger is that it is one of the most complex and distinctive of the human emotions, that it involves bodily, psychological, social, and moral dimensions, and that anger can and ought to be felt and acted upon in a number of right ways.

Which ISME Do You Mean?

Last week, with my partner, I participated in and presented in an excellent, fruitful conference of one of the two ISME organizations with which I am involved.  There are, as it turns out, at least four associations bearing that acronym (as well as a women's fashion catalog, not surprising given that Philosophy also names a skin care product line, and Orexis a rather dubiously successful male enhancement pill).  I've been a longstanding member of the International Society for MacIntyrian Enquiry, and more recently became involved (in a currently much more amateur manner) with the International Society for Military Ethics.

Last week's conference was the meeting of the former organization -- and I'll write more in posts soon to come about selected highlights of those sessions -- but I was not the only attendant to belong to -- or even note the anacronymic ambiguity of -- the two organizations.  The MacIntyrian ISME as a matter of deliberate policy -- since this is in fact what the tradition-dependent moral inquiry Alasdair MacIntyre espouses requires -- invites keynote speakers who are not for the most part MacIntryre scholars or even admirers (sometimes, they are strong critics). One of the keynote speakers, James Connelly, began by noting that he was more accustomed to thinking of the second organization, in whose conversations, projects, inquiries, and debates he was very active.  His presentation dealt with two different fields of ethics, typically called and thought of under the rubric of "applied ethics":  military ethics and environmental ethics.  And the guiding question, which he developed into a stark and detailed contrast, was: what are thought of, spoken about, or advocated as "virtues" in these two fields?

Whose Flourishing Ought We Be Concerned With? (part 1)

A very interesting question was raised recently in one of the LinkedIn groups to which I belong: "Whose flourishing ought we be concerned with?"  Given the nature of group forums -- both that they invite collaboration and dialogue between multiple interlocutors, and that any notions I might work out in detail there would have their readership confined to that group -- I decided the question would provide an excellent blog topic.  I've been working recently on a paper for an upcoming ISME conference on MacIntyre's virtue ethics and prison teaching, so the notion of "flourishing" -- a moral term and goal in virtue ethics -- has been on my mind even more than usual of late.

For those not (yet, or explicitly. . .  one can always hope!) virtue ethicists, here's in a nutshell the significance of what is being talked about in the discussion.  "Flourishing" is one of those somewhat quaint-sounding but actually quite apt terms by which we render a family of teloscertain not-so-easily- translated Greek and Latin terms -- Western virtue ethics goes back to those cultures -- like eu zein / bene vivere (literally "living well") or eudaimonia / beatitudo ("happiness").  Now, why bring up these terminological transformations?  They represent a continuity in a conception of the good for human beings.  In short, for virtue ethics, the Good is not a specific or generic good thing or a possession or enjoyment of such goods.  It consists in a certain way, a kind of pattern and shape, of one's life, one's relationships, one's actions and activities -- put another way, a progressive, ongoing, appropriate, and as full as possible realization of one's potentials as a human being.

Lessons from the EBEP Workshop (part 1 of 2)

I've delivered my last workshop as a Philosophy faculty member to educators in the School of Business and Economics (SoBE) at Fayetteville State University.  This finality is amicable in tone and tenor -- I'm simply leaving FSU in June for opportunities elsewhere (I'll say more in a future post), so if I return to provide further workshops, curriculum review, or assessment assistance, it will be  formally (rather than just functionally) as a consultant in Ethics pedagogy and assessment, rather than as a Philosophy prof.

It's certainly not the last workshop I'll be providing dealing with issues, programs, or initiatives in Ethics -- I intend to further develop and draw on the materials, bases, lessons, and collaborative model of the Ethics in Business Education Project (EBEP) which I co-founded with a Management professor, Beth Hogan, originally to assist SoBE in improving their Ethics assessment required for their specialized disciplinary accreditation with the Association to Advance College Schools of Business (AACSB)  It's not even the last workshop of the EBEP series -- later this month, we're bringing in a former FSU Philosophy prof, Michelle Darnell, who we lost to the Warrington School of Business (University of Florida) last year to give another workshop in Business Ethics pedagogy.  What becomes of EBEP at FSU after I leave depends largely on what the involved Business faculty choose to do with it and whether any of the remaining Philosophy faculty choose to step into the engaging space of dialogue we've created and take up the project.

I'm going to indulge in a little retrospective about what we've achieved with the collaborative project in its first year -- but put off fuller assessment for a followup post after Darnell's workshop -- and then discuss something very interesting, even humorous if you look at it in the right light, that occurred throughout the course of my last workshop, driving doubly home its lessons to me, if not to every one of the participants it was designed for and delivered to.

What's Lost in Translation, and What's Not (part 2)

As if I were addressing a room, rather than casting my bread upon the waters of cyberspace, I'll start with an anecdote, one which I find funny.  Hopefully you will also see the somewhat dark humor in it.

Several years back, Alasdair MacIntyre was on some panel at the Modernity:  Yearing for the Infinite conference at Notre Dame.  I entirely forget what the discussion was about, but remember well a remark he interjected, or at least its essential content.  So, in Thucydidian reformulation (having the characters in one's narrative say not what they really said but what they ought to have said, given their ethos) :

When I was a boy, we were beaten if we did not learn Greek irregular verbs well.  I am not defending beating children.  In fact that is a very bad thing to do, both for the children and for those beating them.  It was painful, and produced anxiety.  But now . . . I can read Sophocles and you can't.

A fellow philosopher Dave O'Hara and I started a conversation on Twitter about languages and translations in philosophy, one which I am certain just as much on his side as on mine, reverberates with countless conversations he carried out with other people down the years. When students in class, other professors, parishioners in study groups, fellow travelers passing the time with talk, and the host of other seemingly chance interlocutors find out that you can read a text in its original language, a language they do not know, there are some standard lines in which the discussion typically develops.  Guiding, understandable, but mistaken assumptions come to light.  Sometimes I point them out.  nowadays, I usually just pass over them and allow the conversation to go as the other person seemingly needs it to proceed.

Why It's Been Quiet

A short post, just to wiggle my toe in the blogging waters (actually have a few posts currently parked and waiting the time and energy to be finished).  In addition to CLA matters aplenty, committee work, teaching classes, and readying presentations, this month has been given over to finishing one stage of what has been so far a 6 year project, and starting another stage.

About six years ago, two years into teaching Philosophy and Religious Studies classes at Indiana State Prison, just two years out of grad school, Adrian Papst, a young, earnest English Catholic guy who was studying at the Institut Catholique de Paris (and whom I'd met at the stimulating Continental Philosophy of Religion conference in Lancaster, where the Radical Orthodoxy types squared off against the Pomos / Derridians), sent me a packet of photocopied documents.

He knew of my love for Maurice Blondel's thought and (largely still untranslated) works, and he mailed me several accounts of meetings of the Société Française de Philosophie, in which Blondel had been involved, accompanied by some other Blondel documents from the early 1930s.  These turned out to be key writings of Blondel during the 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates, which ran roughly from 1931-35 or 36 (depending on how you want to draw the historical boundaries), but I did not know it at the time, until I started reading through the pieces he had sent, and following up with some research and photocopying of my own.