Alasdair MacIntyre: On Having Survived Academic Moral Philosophy (1 of 4)

[cygil1]

Mr Macintyre looks and sounds exactly like the dour Catholic philosopher I already imagined him to be.

[bicyclethief2nd]

Thanks! I can't believe I've actually seen and heard MacIntyre himself ... a tinge of a Scottish accent too!

[fourplusseven]

Great lecture, very enjoyable.

[BandofSorensons]

"To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one's analytic and argumentative skills"...If only this statement were actually true.

[SonoPortoricano]

@BandofSorensons To a great extent it is. Academic philosophy in anglo-saxon universities has been more concerned with analytic and argumentative skills, i.e. "well-argued-for" criterion, than with e.g. the pursuit of wisdom, the truth or falsehood of the thesis proposed/well-argued-for, etc. Indeed, that seems to be the prime criterion for excellence applied to philosophy students in major philosophy (mainly analytical) departments.

[BandofSorensons]

@SonoPortoricano That's the party line but in my experience, which includes years as a graduate student of analytic philosophy, this is not really true. The criterion for excellence applied to philosophy students has absolutely nothing to do with the "well-argued-for" but has everything to do with a fuzzy and yet all important value called "scholarship". A good paper would be one that mentioned all the right names in relation to a "problem" and not necessarily one with some overarching argument.

[LiberalsUtopian]

@SonoPortoricano Well you can't expect all of that from students they are just learning. They are not required to discover new truths.