Pragmatist Possibilities for Alasdair MacIntyre's Philosophy

This thesis argues that Alasdair MacIntyre’s Thomistic turn generates two important difficulties that appear to destabilise his overall position. First, it appears that on the basis of MacIntyre own historical, context-dependent, and developmental account of how traditions develop, Aristotelian-Thomism was in fact sidelined in the course of the various episodes in social-intellectual history, making it hard to see how he can claim that it should be revived, now that it has been surpassed as a tradition. Second, MacIntyre’s commitment to maintaining a close link between moral thinking and the wider social-political context also makes it hard to see how a pre-modern outlook like Aristotelian-Thomism can have a place in the social and political order of the modern world.