Warming up for Fall 2007!

UTEP Philosophy 1301a!

Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue. U. of Notre Dame Press. 1981.

After Virtue...

1.

"A Disquieting Suggestion"

"Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.

"A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists.

"Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down [¡Ora, UTEP Interversity Studies 2350 and Dr. Peter Golding and his loud - mouthed pseudo - Marxists clowns!], physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed.

"Finally a Know - Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.

"Later still there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek to revivie science, although they have largely forgotten what it was.

"But all that they possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge of the theoretical context which gave them significance: half - chapters from books, single pages from articles, not always fully legible because torn and charred...

"Children learn by heart the surviving portions of the periodic table and recite as incantations [just like Harry Potter! Wow! ¡Guau!] some of the theorems of Euclid.

"Nobody, or almost nobody, realises that what they are doing is not natural science in any proper sense at all.

"For everything that they do or say conforms to certain canons of consistency and coherence and those contexts which would be needed to make sense of what they are doing have been lost, perhaps irretrievably...

"The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described."

You bet! And for around the next 243 pages he makes his case, and how!