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Hey everyone... just a random thought. I'm taking a night course on Rousseau's Emile at the moment, and the teacher was talking about this book called "After Virtue" by Alasdair Macintyre. I'd heard of it before, but had never read it. He said that it was required reading for undergraduates... but I'd never heard it mentioned to me when I was undergrad, so I thought I'd better have a read of it.
First of all... is it just Australia or are academic/scholarly books too ****ing expensive???? The professor I work for got a copy of Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" in hardback on Amazon for 26 dollars, yet I saw it in one of my local bookstores for 70+ dollars!
Anyway... I've kinda only started the book... but he seems to be saying that nowadays our understanding of morality has degenerated to such a state that we can no longer successfully provide rational justifications for our moral propositions, but that once upon a time we could. And I was kinda thinking that perhaps the problem, or the reason for the degeneration is the fact that we started trying to provide rational justification for morality in the first place! Forgive me, but I haven't read enough Plato, but from what I've read it seems to me that Socrates' attempts to find rational definitions for ethical concepts end up destroying them in aporia... see, for example, what he does to the idea of piety in the Euthyphro.
But like I said... I haven't read lots of Plato, and I've only just started After Virtue... so maybe I will be educated by further study.
First of all... is it just Australia or are academic/scholarly books too ****ing expensive???? The professor I work for got a copy of Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" in hardback on Amazon for 26 dollars, yet I saw it in one of my local bookstores for 70+ dollars!
Anyway... I've kinda only started the book... but he seems to be saying that nowadays our understanding of morality has degenerated to such a state that we can no longer successfully provide rational justifications for our moral propositions, but that once upon a time we could. And I was kinda thinking that perhaps the problem, or the reason for the degeneration is the fact that we started trying to provide rational justification for morality in the first place! Forgive me, but I haven't read enough Plato, but from what I've read it seems to me that Socrates' attempts to find rational definitions for ethical concepts end up destroying them in aporia... see, for example, what he does to the idea of piety in the Euthyphro.
But like I said... I haven't read lots of Plato, and I've only just started After Virtue... so maybe I will be educated by further study.
isn't morality just better way, than not beeing moral, to achieve what you should want?
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