Keywords

Philosophy, ethics, meta ethics, st. thomas aquinas, alasdair macintyre, medieval philosophy, contemporary philosophy

Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre argues in favor of a historicist Thomism in ethics and political philosophy. In his theory, sociological categories take up much of the space traditionally occupied by metaphysics. This peculiar feature of MacIntyre's Thomism, and its merits and demerits, is already a subject that has been taken up by many critics. In this thesis, these criticisms are supplemented and unified by identifying what is perhaps the most fundamental difficulty with MacIntyre's ethics: his version of Thomism is problematic because it treats epistemology as first philosophy. This misstep compromises MacIntyre's ability to provide a defense of moral objectivity, while also undermining his theory's usefulness in deriving moral rules. The result is an ethics of doubtful coherence. If Thomism is to offer a viable alternative to Enlightenment morality and Nietzschean genealogy, it must defend the priority of metaphysics with respect to epistemology.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2014

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Jones, Donald

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Graduate Studies

Department

Interdisciplinary Studies

Degree Program

Interdisciplinary Studies

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0005537

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0005537

Language

English

Release Date

December 2014

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Graduate Studies; Graduate Studies -- Dissertations, Academic

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Philosophy Commons

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