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• February 25th, 2021

  And then there's 📙 After Virtue, which is a book about Virtue Ethics but whose most interesting perspectives to me have to do with the nature of Intelligibility in human action and how it relates to Narrative.

• 📙 After Virtue

  “Instead, it is written as a defence of ordinary social ‘practices’, and of the ‘goods internal to practices’. Pursuit of these helps to give narrative structure and Intelligibility to our lives, but these goods must be defended against their corruption by ‘institutions’, which pursue such 'external goods' as money, power and status.”

  My own conclusion is very clear. It is that on the one hand we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualist point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores Intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.

  But to this I want to reply that the concept of an Intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action as such. UnIntelligible actions are failed candidates for the status of Intelligible action; and to lump unIntelligible actions and Intelligible actions together in a single class of actions and then to characterize action in terms of what items of both sets have in common is to make the mistake of ignoring this. It is also to neglect the central importance of the concept of Intelligibility.

  The importance of the concept of Intelligibility is closely related to the fact that the most basic distinction of all embedded in our discourse and our practice in this area is that between human beings and other beings. Human beings can be held to account for that of which they are the authors; other beings cannot.

• 📙 Being-In-The-World

  In his emphasis on the social context as the ultimate foundation of Intelligibility, Heidegger is similar to that other twentieth-century critic of the philosophical tradition, Ludwig Wittgenstein. They share the view that most philosophical problems…

• 📙 Experiences of Depression

  Schizophrenia can therefore involve an erosion of practical significance that differs from what I have described in relation to depression. The world lacks a coherence that is required for the Intelligibility of sustained purposive activity.