ABSTRACT
Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 opening account of Either/Or in After Virtue brought Kierkegaard to center stage in a narrative of moral theory written well within the mainstream of English-speaking philosophy.1 MacIntyre’s picture of Either/Or and Kierkegaard has been quite influential, but I think it falls short.2 Showing how and why it does brings Kierkegaard’s double masterpiece into better light. We come to see how it displays aspects of the interplay between the aesthetic and the ethical that have been generally overlooked. That double and endlessly restarting book does far more than pit a successful and loquacious civil servant, Judge Wilhelm against a silent, nameless poet we’ve come to know as “the aesthete,” or “A.”
