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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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Alasdair MacIntyre
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 12
Philosopher
Professor
Glasgow
Scotland
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre
Strangers
Least
Collection
Interest
Collections
Society
Stranger
Culture
Appearance
Often
Interests
Minimal
Nothing
Surface
Pursuing
Constraints
Indeed

More quotes by Alasdair MacIntyre

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The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.
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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.
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Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.
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Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.
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Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.
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Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
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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.
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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.
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Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
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What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.
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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
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It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.
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Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.
Alasdair MacIntyre
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The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture
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We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.
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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.
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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
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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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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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Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.
Alasdair MacIntyre