ABSTRACT
Stanley Hauerwas's appeal to practices helps Christians develop habits of behavior, and not just doctrinal beliefs that enable them to live more like Jesus. Furthermore, from a Christian standpoint, his appeal to the telling of one's story, along with Christian behavior in the body, are vitally important forms of witnessing to non-Christians of the truth of the gospel. Alasdair MacIntyre wants to argue that Thomism is the most rational tradition so far, and apparently not just as the contention of a discrete community. Linguistic communities supposedly overcome the loss of moral knowledge by creating their realities, and they secure moral knowledge simply by how they have made their own worlds. The private language argument effectively vacates meaning from the individual's mind and relocates it in the social, linguistically formed group. To refute the skeptic, knowledge is purchased by switching meaning from a first-person point of view to a third-person, social perspective.
