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Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.

Alasdair MacIntyre

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Alasdair MacIntyre
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 12
Philosopher
Professor
Glasgow
Scotland
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre
Alive
Fish
Weighs
Society
Subtle
Explanations
Doe
Fishes
Charles
Explain
Pointed
Members
Royal
Number
Invited
Dead
Offered
Numbers
Explanation

More quotes by Alasdair MacIntyre

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[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical, or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve
Alasdair MacIntyre
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It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
Alasdair MacIntyre
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At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.
Alasdair MacIntyre