ABSTRACT
In After Virtue, Alasdair Maclntyre makes the following claim about the “theistic version of classical morality”, that is, medieval moral philosophy. Moral sentences are thus used within this framework to make claims which are true or false. Most medieval proponents of this scheme did of course believe that it was itself part of God’s revelation, but also a discovery of reason and rationally defensible. This large area of agreement does not however survive when Protestantism and Jansenist Catholicism and their immediate late medieval predecessors appear on the scene. Crucial to the thesis presented here is the effect this new conception of human nature and human reason had on philosophy’s understanding of and orientation toward language. Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation cemented into western consciousness a conception of human nature as basically depraved and likewise ushered in a conception of reason far more restricted in scope than that known to pre-Reformation philosophy.
