I continued to be impressed by Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. More than impressed. Amazed. It has many, well, virtues, but you can’t read it without being astounded by MacIntyre’s grasp of Western philosophy (with occasional notes on Icelandic and Islamic traditions as well). The mere fact that the comments eruditely on Kierkegaard, Nietszsche and Sartre one one hand, on GE Moore and CL Stevenson on the other, the Scholastics on a third hand, and Foucaultishly (high praise!) on the Greeks from Homer through the tragedians, would be enough. Dayenu! Contemporary Western philosophy has become so fragmented that cutting across all of its branches is an achievement worth acknowledging. Just his command of languages — does the fact that he refers to Kierkegaard’s Either/Or by its Danish title mean that he reads Danish also? — is enough to turn your head.
So, ignoring for the moment the content of the book and the nuance of its argument, I am bowled over simply by his expertise – like being amazed by Rembrandt’s brushwork. We need people like MacIntyre who are able to spend a lifetime reading, learning, thinking and writing.

The point about MacIntyre is not that he is a professional. It is that he is an expert. Andrew Keen in The Cult of the Amateur it seems to me sometimes confuses those two things. Keen is right to point out that we have a traditional “ecosystem” that enables people like MacIntyre to flourish. But that ecosystem — in this case, the university system — is not endangered by the new connectedness that is the Internet. The profession that enables MacIntyre to support himself through his studies is largely intact. Now, because of the Internet, we are able to benefit from experts who are amateurs or professionals. [Tags: alasdair+macintyre andrew+keen amateurs scholars ]

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