ABSTRACT
Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty agree on two fundamental matters, namely, to put it in Rorty's words, "that philosophy as practiced professionally today lacks anysystematic unity" and that this very fact poses for us now, standing where we stand, "a central philosophical problem." Yet MacIntyre also sees himself in fundamental disagreement with Rorty, though exactly what this comes to seems elusive. MacIntyre's claim that keeping philosophy and the "other" disciplines in such an integral relation is a good thing, and his further and related claim that, a la Kant and Thomas Reid, we should not take "philosophy" as a name for a distinct discipline, are claims that Rorty would heartily assent to. Rorty's genealogical account of the history of philosophy does not require, for its acceptance, "standards of objectivity and rationality of just the kind that the initial genealogical history was designed to discredit".
