This 8-week course is designed to lead students through one of the most important and influential works of 20th century virtue ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, first published in 1981. Studying MacIntyre's work involves not just engaging with his own interesting ideas, but also with his interpretations of many other thinkers from the ancient period down to the present, arranged in an ongoing narrative of moral theories, and involving several different important options for the present.

MacIntyre was a philosopher whose work straddled a number of fields, not just moral theory, but also politics, cultural criticism, philosophy of science, history of ideas, philosophy of religion, and philosophical engagements with psychoanalysis. After Virtue represented an important turning point in his thought, taking place roughly at the halfway point of his long life and career.

He followed After Virtue with a number of other works, three of which are particularly connected with After Virtue in a tetralogy advancing its main arguments and project. These are Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Three Rival Versions Of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals.

Over the 8 weeks of this online class, we will be engaging in study together of the entirety of After Virtue. This work should be challenging, and remain so even for those who have read it multiple times. We will have discussions that are aimed at deepening your understanding and working through confusions, questions, or puzzles that can arise from the many topics MacIntyre ranges over

MacIntyre develops one overarching argument about moral theory and moral inquiry, namely that the most adequate approach that we can take in the present will require something like a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, a recovery and reconstitution of a tradition-based mode of inquiry, involving practices, communities, and even institutions.

The narrative involves examining a number of other approaches to ethics, some ancient, some medieval, some early modern and Enlightenment, and a number of them post-Enlightenment. MacIntyre provides some rather in-depth critical analyses of a variety of virtue ethics, utilitarian, egoist, deontological, emotivist, natural law, and other approaches to moral theory, development, and decision-making. He is also developing a narrative in which these theories are embedded within larger complex societies, political communities, and institutions.

In this course, we will also be examining some of the criticisms of MacIntyre's position that have been raised at various points, as well as MacIntyre's own views upon his project and his philosophical development.