Storicismo e realismo nel pensiero di Alasdair Macintyre

My aim, in this work, is to analyze Alasdair MacIntyre’s theoretical system. MacIntyre (1929-) is a Scottisch born and American ‘adopted’ philosopher. Critics usually framed his moral position as representative of current normative ethics of virtue inspired from Aristotle, and his political thought as conservative, seeing as how they consider MacIntyre as neo-comunitarian thinker. But, as I have tried to show, this is a misunderstanding of his political position. Anyway critics omits methodological aspect of macintyrean thought. For this reason, re-writing the history of modernity, exposed not only in After Virtue but also in others papers, this work show the theoretical path that drove Scottish philosopher, also through comparison with the philosophy of science, to build a new method of enquiry that is opposed to the explanatory-predictive method pursued by the ‘academic orthodoxy’. Indeed, this methodology, according to MacIntyre, omits history from philosophical enquiry and so brought our contemporary culture into a state of abysmal crisis: the ‘disquieting suggestion’. Since following efforts to provide a solution for the moral disagreement have failed, it was necessary to pinpoint another philosophical outlook to solve moral disagreement. In this perspective should be read processing of his historicist method that begin by acknowledgement of narrative character of reality. However this approach, developed by MacIntyre to give an appropriate answer to the problems of relativism and perspectivism, has resulted criticism of inconsistency: his position would remain entangled in a vicious circle. MacIntyre’s answer to the Enlightenment project failure has been labeled itself as a form of relativism by some critics, according to which, if the MacIntyre’s aim was to find a solution to the ‘disquieting suggestion’, he would have failed. He would not reply carefully to relativism and perspectivism. He would not be able to build a convincing theory that escapes relativism and perspectivism, ‘the protagonist of post–Enlightenment’: he would be a relativist thinker. How can this mistake be avoided? Answering to this challenge, in his later writings, MacIntyre does appeal to Aristotelian-Thomism’s synthesis and improves a concept of tradition as a intellectual inquiry. This is the deep meaning of the macintyrean tradition–constituted and tradition–constitutive method of enquiry, whose application on every level of investigation (epistemological, ethical and social and anthropological) allows the full intelligibility of philosophical and ethical concepts because far away from hypostatizing those concepts it gives a rational account by inserting them in the respective contexts of reference and treating them as part of a whole. The MacIntyre’s effort is thereby to connect his historical inquiry with the Aristotelian-Thomism’s metaphysics.