My Engagements with Alasdair MacIntyre and His Works | Philosophical Developments and Commitments

over the years i have done a number of videos that i class under philosophical developments and commitments there's actually a playlist devoted to those that i'll link below in case you're interested in seeing more of these and one of my interlocutors on youtube recently pointed out that although i i talk a lot about him one person that i've never done one of those videos on is alistair mcintyre probably best known for this book after virtue this is the second edition though the one that i originally bought i've also got the third edition you can see right behind me i've got quite a few mcintyre works and mcintyre is somebody with whom i'm largely in an agreement and admire in terms of both his his writing and thinking but also in terms of his character because he's somebody who i actually got to work with and got to know somewhat uh really about a decade and a half ago and so i'm going to tell you some of that that story and it's a complicated story i'm not going to try to speak for him at all in this you know he's a living philosopher he can certainly do that on his own as he's done at great length and in many admirable ways from place to place and time to time so i'm going to begin the story by talking about where i first heard of the guy and then how i encountered his works so when i was a graduate student people would mention him quite frequently especially after i was moving out of my like interested in philosophy of language and super interested in continental philosophy and now picking up you know um more let's call it traditional oriented stuff like aristotelianism and the stoics and thomas aquinas and people go you probably really like to read aleister mcintyre and i was like well okay i'll get to it eventually and then on our prelims reading list and our prelims are preliminary examinations that we had to take at the phd level back then the long since phased out at southern illinois university and at most places you know throughout the united states we had these extensive reading lists because we were in a pluralistic department which meant that we had representatives of continental philosophy analytic philosophy classical american philosophy even some people interested in history of philosophy and this this work after virtue was one of the many books on the list for ethics political philosophy and aesthetics there were probably about 30 to 40 books on the list that we had to go over you know like john stuart mills utilitarianism and second critique and of course the groundwork and you know we go on and on and on and so i started the summer that i was preparing for that that examination which by the way i got a high pass on which is kind of cool i picked up this book which was available at the bookstore that i used to frequent that i've talked about in some others that was run by two guys uh one of whom ended up buying out the other one it was where you'd go to get all the independent stuff and all the cool cutting edge stuff um you know also you know rent interesting independent videos and and they had after virtue and so i bought this and started reading my way through it and my experience with it was one of those oh yeah this is right up my alley this is this is the kind of stuff that i've been kind of groping towards in terms of thinking about you know what modernity is and moral life and contemporary culture this is the kind of stuff that that i have been you know kind of thinking but but here's somebody who's actually articulating it and in a robust really solid way and i i really enjoyed after virtue and you know like like a lot of people when you read something that you like by a particular author you don't just stick with that you go and see what else they they've got and so it wasn't too long before you know we we got into the whole we call it quadrilogy of mcintyre and i've got it right here so you see you've got after virtue and then you've got who's justice which rationality which was also kind of a popular book being talked about quite a lot when i was in graduate school and then he also came out with three rival versions of moral inquiry which were his gifford lectures if you don't know the gifford lectures are really one of the major things as a philosopher it's sort of like being invited to do you know a performance for a whole bunch of other great musicians if you're a musician and then he'd also come out with a dependent animals the paul kerris lectures why human beings need the virtues and that's 1999 so really all of these were on all of these were available by the time that i started getting into mcintyre and i read them in succession and studied them over and over again and made a lot of use of them so by the time that i was getting out of uh graduate school in 2002 i had read my way through all of these and you know gotten a lot of mileage out of them i was also um if i do i was i part of the it's me at that time i'm not sure i'll tell that that story a little bit later but you know what's going on why do we call this a quadrilogy because mcintyre is raising some really important themes in after virtue then you know going back to a lot of the same ground you notice whose justice which rationality is much larger it's about like double the length of after virtue and then adding to the story with three rival versions and then finally bringing things to a close in dependent rational animals and you know this these are really important works i think that this will be this sequence will be something that will mcintyre will be known for centuries from now they're very important and they have their resources in his his earlier work which i'll talk about in a minute and how i encountered that and they also you know project forward into the the work that he's still you know cranking away at at present and has done over the last you know uh really two decades you could say so you know for me this is this is really quite important and i do want to say that i you know there were their points where i don't think mcintyre has things entirely right but even when he's wrong he's usually wrong in interesting provocative ways that have a kind of openness to them he's not like you know somebody's got you know a lockstep you know here's the way things were done and here's how everything fits together he's you know he really thinks that a traditional living tradition has to have a kind of receptivity to criticism and so you know i was already you could say an admirer of mcintyre and then uh i had a a really unique opportunity and this opportunity was to study with him and so how did that happen well you know in the early days of the internet when we were using dial-up modems and stuff like that you know i i was pretty involved in doing philosophy and i was i was my first job i was teaching at a maximum security prison indiana state prison up in michigan city i was teaching for ball state and i i actually was teaching in a degree program these prisoners would get bachelor's in general studies and they could minor in philosophy or religious studies both of which i taught i actually introduced them to mcintyre there some some of the prisoners and they they liked him quite a bit um and i saw this this call for participants you know you could apply for the notre dame and i was spending a lot of time at notre dame more mcintyre was by the way and he was associated with a a center that i myself would go to the events of the center for ethics and culture he was a fellow at the center i'd already seen him speak in events that the center would put on these big conferences and you know i was pretty impressed with with him but i hadn't met him and this erasmus institute faculty seminar was this program and it turns out that we were the very last year the the program was running out of money but they were putting this on and for two weeks they would put you up at notre dame and you would you know they give you all your meals and stuff like that and every single weekday you would study with aleister mcintyre from about eight in the morning to about four in the afternoon taking a break for lunch and he didn't go to lunch with us um but you know we we members we faculty fellows got to talk with each other as well and so when i saw this i was you know the other thing i'll mention too all of these have some sort of focus now mcintyre if you don't know this he likes to do things in threes he likes to take you know we've got this book three rival versions of moral inquiry right mcintyre really does have a penchant for taking three different strands and comparing contrasting them against each other bringing them into dialogue with each other and for this erasmus institute seminar the three that he was doing were rational choice or decision theory which was you know sort of a contemporary way of looking at things ties together with analytic philosophy and ethics but also has its roots as he was going to argue in a human and also hobbsian way of looking at things so we got one version over there adam smith kind of figures into it as well and we actually had an adam smith scholar as one of the people then on the other side we had aristotle and thomas aquinas you know by then sort of stock and trade for for mcintyre who by the way did not start out as an aristotelian he he came to that and came to the atomist much later on and then um the third one which was kind of interesting and kind of a surprise was freud and le con so psychoanalytic theory and not just any psychoanalytic theory but you know one of the originators makes sense sort of like corresponding to aristotle and then a great reinterpreter sort of like thomas aquinas with uh aristotle except it's lacana saying we need to go back to freud and i saw that and i was like well i actually know all three of these areas um it's a chance to hang out with mcintyre and you know see what he has to think about things and let's do it so i applied for it and i got accepted and there were 12 of us if i remember correctly and i was pretty much the junior scholar there there were a few people who were you know maybe around the same in in their career path as i was remember i was only three years out of grad school and actually nobody was as junior as i was um i hadn't published all that much at that point and so i was kind of like you know um you know they call it the dark horse right other people you could tell why they were in the seminar like some of them had studied with mcintyre before had connections uh many of them had been you know out there being professors and publishing on stuff for 20 30 years there were a few younger people but they were further along they were getting close to going for tenure and all of that and almost none of them knew much about freud and lacan the only exception would be the one from uh um who had researched paul recur and was working on him um there were a lot of people who knew a lot about thomas and aristotle of course and then there were some who knew a bit about the rational choice theory i was the only person who actually knew about all three and i think that played a role in my getting accepted i also found out that one of the other things that got me accepted was that mcintyre was genuinely interested in my prison teaching and you know what the prisoners were like and what they were learning because mcintyre is extremely interested in institutions in ordinary people in how things work in the messy world that we we live in so it was an amazing experience um you know we we started out each day with this you know breakfast together and then we'd migrate over to this this building i don't remember which hall we were in you know notre dame was as usual undergoing construction uh so we had to you know sometimes circum you know navigate the the campus and uh you know then then mcintyre began and he starts off by you know saying we're going to talk about these three rival versions let's all introduce each other and let's jump right in to thinking about rational choice or decision theory and where it comes from what are its assumptions what what is the way in which it treats desire and so you know we went the entire time i actually went home on the weekend because i had you know a young child at the time and i only lived an hour and a half from notre dame so i stayed there and then then came back and um you know i also took advantage of being there at notre dame to spend you know at least two hours every day in the the hesburgh library doing work on one of my my main um preoccupations at the time the 1930s christian philosophy debates um but i also hung out with the other participants and you know each of us had the opportunity to do some one-on-one time with mcintyre i i put that off because i lived nearby to to later on and so we had this amazing seminar that lasted two weeks and you know he was very interested not just in freud and lacombe but also as you would guess from if you read um rational dependent animals and on a freud and charles winnicott and um i might be mixing up winnicott's name i think i've done that in other places um but you know it was it was really quite great and um then afterwards you know i kept in touch with some of the people from the the seminar we each got to present our own stuff so i presented some stuff from the 1930s christian philosophy debate mcintyre later on handed me a manuscript and he said i don't know if you'll find this useful but um and you can't cite it or anything but here you go and it turned out that one of the one of the translations that i had done uh uh emil berrier right uh and his important like kickoff piece about uh the christian whether there's christian philosophy mcintyre had done one of his own for his own students years back because he was interested in these these topics and uh he said you can like you know check your translation against mine and see you know what whatever you think so so i did that and um then you know in in the the months to come after that i you know went back to teaching at the prison the prison itself was only about an hour from notre dame so i would i would drive down you know sometimes after work and i got to meet with mcintyre at his office you know we chatted about things had lunch i asked him by that time actually these books had come out the selected essays right the tasks of philosophy selected essays volume one ethics and politics selected essays volume two i did reviews of these for octa philosophica i actually brought them and uh this is this is kind of an interesting little little tidbit here so i you know i said hey would you sign the book and he took me very literally and he just signed his name but that's that's mcintyre you know not a lot of pretension not a lot of uh extra stuff going on and so you know after reading these i was like hey did you ever read gabriel marcel because a lot of what you're doing in in some of this stuff having to do with like the body and all that it's very similar to what marsala is doing he said no really i haven't read him much um you know i'm not drawing on him there's similar themes and so you know we talked about that a bit he asked me about maurice blondell who he really hadn't read much of and what there was available in blondel that he might find interesting i had just done my dissertation uh and defended it in 2002 i'm blown down we talked a bit about the christian philosophy debates we also talked about a variety of other things and that was you know that was quite nice and i saw mcintyre um several times later on while i was still living in indiana um at conferences and and every time i i'd run into him he'd come up to me and and say oh how are you doing and how how's your at that time you're you're you know your one daughter and and how are things going with your your publishing and he's very genuine guy there's no there's no about him and when it comes to virtue ethics you can say that he's not just somebody who talks the talk he really walks the walk he is very interested in plain persons he's not what you would call a respecter of persons in the biblical sense meaning somebody who gives a lot of attention to people who have prestige or connections as opposed to regular people and so it's something i found incredibly refreshing about the guy but it makes a lot of sense if you look at his earlier works and i've got a few of his earlier works here you know mcintyre for a long time was you know he was trained in the analytic uh you could call it tradition and he sees the the deficits of that fairly early on he's also for a long time a marxist and not sort of a doctrinaire um carry around pictures of chairman mao you know kind of kind of marxist but somebody who thinks that there's something really there that has to be plumbed and thought through and you know two great works that kind of fit in with that would be his against the self images of the the age essays on ideology and philosophy you can tell he was a younger guy the time that is written by the the pictures that they're using on it and um you know this is a quite interesting stuff he's also got a great book of selected essays on hegel that he edited and contributed hegel on on bones and skulls if i remember there's this great little book herbert marcuza and exposition and polemic this is the kind of stuff that mcintyre did you know he took he took things seriously another that i i came across when i started writing on i was originally trying to do something with the materials from uh the seminar um he's got a book on called the unconscious that he wrote quite a while ago and originally he was um [Music] he was uh teaching a class right and so he said i'll turn this into a book and so this is quite quite interesting he's also well known for this short history of ethics which is quite good there's some gaps in it of course um but but it's it's you know it's very interesting and actually that's that's a good place for me to segue into something um there are gaps within mcintyre's work he acknowledges that he's got no problem saying that and when there are those gaps he wants to know what's missing and what should be there a lot of kierkegaard scholars actually contributed to an entire edited volume criticizing mcintyre's treatment of kierkegaard in uh his works and mcintyre responded to them you know anthony long wrote this excellent piece about how you know contemporary and ancient stoicism really ought to be understood as a parallel to the aristotelian and neo aristotelian tradition that mcintyre is championing and you know that mcintyre's take on stoicism is essentially like you know conscientism before it's time is is is getting things wrong um and mcintyre you know is willing to say okay there's something there i i actually myself wrote a piece uh a while back and and gave it at one of the um international society for mcintyre and inquiry conferences about how mcintyre is getting anselm wrong and could be doing some very interesting things if he had thought of and some less in terms of like the ontological argument and more in terms of moral theory and the reforms of the church and of european culture in the time that anselm was writing and working and occasionally being exiled by english kings um i never sent that often i suppose i should send it off to them you know sometime but you know those are the sort of things where there's you know gaps in the story but mcintyre is happy to have those filled in he you know got very interested in phenomenology ends up writing a book on edith stein you know some of his other books that you know we've we've got to uh later on god a god philosophy university is a selective history of the catholic philosophical tradition uh good work there ethics in the conflicts of modernity this is a much more recent work uh from 2016 you know quite interesting as well reconsidering a lot of things he's constantly rebuilding it and i think that's that's quite admirable i'll tell you just two more things and then bring this to a close because this is already getting a little bit long so you know the one is that i haven't myself been in touch with mcintyre for for quite some time i've meant to write him from time to time but i also figure he's pretty busy and there's a lot of people who make demands on his time and you know i probably should you know write him a letter of of thanks not least because he actually you know years and years and years ago after the erasmus institute he wrote me um a letter of recommendation which which proved to be quite helpful for me because you know people were impressed with the fact that i knew mcintyre had nice things to say about me and so you know the last time that i interacted with him was about 10 years ago and i'd written him a letter about where i was teaching at the time fayetteville state university which was at that time the most dysfunctional institution i'd ever seen and i mentioned that mechner is very interested in institutions and goods and how people are served by them or not served by them and i wrote them this longish letter about it you know and said listen i'm i'm actually trying to you know find a way out of here and mcintyre wrote me back and he said well here's he wrote a lot of things but one of the things that he said is you know um it's too bad that you're stuck in a place like that but on the other hand it's really great that you're stuck in a place like that because the students deserve somebody who actually does care about their education and will put in the time and work and i know that you're that guy so you know he's not just saying suck it up buddy but he's saying you know you might be the right person at the right time for getting some some good stuff done for for that institution and members and all that and i i thought that was sort of your typical mcintyre thing to say the other thing i'll say is i've mentioned um isme the international society for mcintyre and inquiry which was founded if i remember right i want to say around 2006 or so and i've participated in i think three of their conferences uh giving papers each time the first time i gave a paper i'll put a link to it below was on mcintyre and psychotherapy and psychoanalysis i gave another paper the one i mentioned about anselm saying here's you know here's what we could look at from from anselm from a macintyrian perspective mcintyre himself didn't but here's what we could draw upon and then the third one had to do with prison education and what we should make of you know education in general and how we treat incarcerated people and doing that from a macintyrian perspective as well and you know it's it's an ongoing institution uh [Music] haven't been very involved in it of late because i've just been so busy but it's something that i think i might get back into because i had a lot of you know good friends in the organization some of them aristotelians some of them marxists some of them all sorts of other things in between actually the last thing i will tell you that i think this is a great thing to close on so when it's me was founded they did two things that i thought were particularly good one of which actually stemmed from mcintyre so the one thing that they did is they would characteristically invite plenary speakers who had some sort of beef some sort of fundamental disagreement with mcintyre so that we could get some alternative perspectives and we weren't just turning into like a mutual admiration society the way a lot of philosophical organizations do that is characteristically mcintyre if you want your tradition to be healthy it has to confront its critics right the other thing was as far as i know there's only been one or maybe two times that mcintyre has actually gone to is me and that's by his own choice and you know so you could say was he being a jerk there no he realized that if he went to to you know a society that's organized around his thought people would be looking to him for all the answers and he didn't want that to be the case the exception that he made was if i remember right when he turned 90 and they had a big celebration for him great thing to do and and so you know he did that that time but the rest of the times he doesn't mix in with that because he wants people to develop on their own without you know appealing to the master or you know looking to him for all the answers he wants to promote uh what we could call autonomy and true discussion and interpretation and i think that that's something really quite admirable and typically macintyrian so that's a great thing to close on i think now i've made good on the lack of previous discussion of this and hopefully you'll want to read mcintyre's works and take on some of his thoughts you

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 5,626

Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Sadler, Philosophy, Learning, Reason

Id: TFGZIZBvGkQ

Length: 29min 7sec (1747 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021