Closing – or probably continuing – the circle – this piece by Ian Glendinnig is a good review of Alastair MacIntyre’s ‘After Virtue’, especially in the light of ‘meaning crisis’ related shenanigans. He wrote this in 2008 and added a comment after he saw my 2018 post (here attributed as 2023) on Epistemological crises, dramatice narrative and the philophy of science (MacIntyre, 1955) (https://stream.syscoi.com/2018/09/23/epistemological-crises-dramatic-narrative-and-the-philosophy-of-science-alasdair-mcintyre-the-monist-1977/)

Ian Glendinning

[Caveat – this review may not do the subject justice, but I didn’t really notice how good a read it was until I was well into it, by which point not only did I not have any notes, but I was committed to read on to a conclusion. So from memory …  is the summary (in the bullets) any good ?]

[Post Note – Matt Kundert, in this (2008) post and the comment thread below, has turned-up as a McIntyre reference in my wider “Systems Thinking” context thanks to a (2023) post by Ben Taylor linking to an earlier (1977) piece pre-dating “After Virtue” (1981) by Al McIntyre and reviewed by Matt. And re-reading this post now in 2023, I see a wonderful irony in my use of the word “governance” in my implicitly cybernetic (psyberton-ic) context before I had made the connection explicit. What goes around comes around. ]

I’ve had a copy of Alastair MacIntyre’s (1981, 2nd Ed 1984) “After Virtue” tucked away on a bookshelf for some time. I vaguely remembered I’d bought it on the recommendation of Rev Sam, but no recollection of why it came to be tucked-away unread. [I since discover it’s Sam’s most important read ever – after being turned onto things philosophical by ZMM, like myself, and away from “scientism”, as I already was before I read ZMM, “After Virtue” turned Sam to Christianity and theology. Wow. Matt too claims MacIntyre and After Virtue as an important route to understanding the Greeks.]

Whatever Next ? – Psybertron Asks