Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's
After Virtue has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary mor
al philosophy. In this book, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral langu
age that he traced back to a European Enlightenment that had made the formulatio
n of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the search for a way out of thi
s impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of A
ristotle, who emphasised the importance of 'virtue' to the ethical life. More th
an thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that
is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics an
d morality today.
