ABSTRACT
Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988, is a Niagara. Alasdair MacIntyre claims that different schools of philosophy must differ fundamentally about what counts as a rational way to settle intellectual differences. Reading between the lines one can see that he has in mind nationalities as well as thinkers and literary criticism as well as academic philosophy. MacIntyre like others before him perceives Aquinas’s work as a brilliant amalgam of Christian theology with Aristotle’s philosophy. Moreover, analytic philosophers mostly teach philosophy in just the way MacIntyre says it ought to be taught, that is, by critical questioning. The series featured MacIntyre of the University of Notre Dame as the philosophers’ philosopher. MacIntyre’s project as elsewhere is to put up a fight against philosophical relativism. He is somewhat bewitched by his enemy, a Gorgon that keeps reappearing in his books in new and ever more terrible forms.
