In the past few years and on both sides of the Atlantic, Alasdair MacIntyre has been the subject of renewed attention in the academic world. Together with his tireless and steadfast production of scientific papers, he has published two new books in the space of two years: an introduction to Edith Stein and a collection of essays in two volumes. The first deals with themes of philosophy; the second, his own views on ethics and politics. In the meantime, much of his previous work has been republished in new, augmented editions. In addition, scholars have already produced a significant amount of material on his ideas as a whole, which include his most recent writings. Among these contributions to the debate is Thomas D. D'Andrea's book. The author, a senior research fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, explains that his “book is, and does not pretend to be other than, an introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre's philosophy” (xiii). In his publisher's words, it is “the first comprehensive and detailed treatment of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre … an accessible critical study of the full range of MacIntyre's thought.”

D'Andrea's reflection revolves around MacIntyre's main work, After Virtue, recently republished in English, Italian, and German (with a new prologue by the author). Moreover, it treats the well-known Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. This large volume has a simple structure. In the first part, D'Andrea analyzes the main subjects of MacIntyre's early writings: modern moral philosophy, Marxism, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of action, linking each subject to one or two of the main and most renowned works of the philosopher and to a wide selection of his papers. The second part of this volume is entirely devoted to a synthesis of After Virtue, in which the different topics of the first part take their own place within a Thomistic-Aristotelian framework. This approach should constitute an original contribution to the ethics of the virtues, as well as an epistemological theory of moral rationality. The third part is divided into two short chapters, one dealing with the main criticisms of this synthesis, and the second pointing toward further developments. D'Andrea states that he is aiming “at a perspicuous representation of MacIntyre's thought from the inside” (xiii).

Thankfully, D'Andrea's frees MacIntyre from two contradictory and superficial criticisms: he neither endorses an acritical, conservative allegiance to claims of this or that philosophical school nor does he endorse an eclectic thinker who readily follows the sirens of academic fashion. This book emphasizes the continuity of MacIntyre's philosophical enquiry in which he rationally challenges different traditions. MacIntyre's claims are put in their own context, making the ideas presented here both complex and unified. At the same time, they are open to analysis.

The reader might be surprised when he takes a look at the reference bibliography at the end of the volume: D'Andrea jumps unexpectedly from an essay published in 2001 to the book on Edith Stein (2005) and the two volumes of the Selected Essays (2006), skipping a significant amount of MacIntyre's noteworthy writings. Some main works are neither mentioned nor discussed in the text, and even some original theses on the nature of human beings, such as Dependent Rational Animals (1999), appear only in the short “Postscript to the Project.”

The bibliography also lacks references to several relevant papers, some published before the early 1990s. These papers had already begun to develop some topics of MacIntyre's writings of the last few years—the nature of good and its knowledge by plain persons; the architecture of human good, particular goods, rules, and virtues; and their connection with natural and positive law. By and large, seventeen years of intense production seem to fall into oblivion. Regarding biographical sources, one would have hoped the author would consider the large number of interviews presently available (Atlantida, Cogito, Kynesis, Borradori) and the even larger amount of specific and sometimes autobiographical explanations inserted in the introductions to the new editions of his works. Inexplicably, MacIntyre as a real person, with all his personal questions and wishes, disappears from our view after an initial, three-page biography. Only a small sample of what the reader misses can be given here: for example, in 1966, MacIntyre was well aware that his History of Ethics contained two very different visions of the subject that he could not put together. One of his following books, Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), is divided in two parts, each with its own introduction and ends with the frustrating assumption that he has reached a dead-end in his inquiry. Just before writing one of his most important essays, Epistemological Crises (1977), he declared to Giovanna Borradori that he remembered his “formation as being immersed in a painful state of mind, simultaneously drawn in a number of directions intellectually” (The American Philosopher, 142). MacIntyre tried to make his way free of this situation; he found a possible, provisional solution a few years later, when he wrote Epistemological Crises and started working on After Virtue. We could quote similar examples in his following works. Consequently, both the so-called After Virtue synthesis and the following project remain inexplicably incomplete in content and somewhat at odds with the internal perspective that D'Andrea originally proposed. It is very interesting that Against the Self-Images of the Age is dissected by D'Andrea in its different chapters (which were former essays), and the Introductions, in which MacIntyre's project is still vaguely explained as a way of making philosophy compatible with personal, ideological commitment are forgotten.

These two kinds of oversight are not simply marginal, philological footnotes. They point to something from which the reader should expect some theoretical, not to mention practical, explanation before any further debate. Furthermore, one might wonder if this asymmetry between the form and the content of the philosophizing is accidental or not.

At this point, the reviewer is confronted with two possible choices: either providing his reader with what MacIntyre has published in the recent years and judging D'Andrea's book from that perspective or raising a series of related questions, connected with the facts outlined before. In other words, asking whether or not this book is a philosophically correct introduction to MacIntyre's thought. I believe it is more fruitful to follow the second way, as there are a few passages at the beginning of the book that might offer some insight.

The introduction of the volume points to a dilemma from the very first line: in order to provide a “more or less comprehensive overview of the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre” (xiii, italics added). An introduction to any philosophical theory is deeply dependent on the biography of its author, but we need to balance that information concerning why a thinker raises certain questions with the theoretical results of his inquiry. A long debate follows; clearly, a balance is never easy to reach though it is evident that we cannot confuse philosophy with mere biography. At the end of all biographical considerations, the reader must forget that Socrates decided to die for justice instead of running away from Athens; that Plato failed several times to apply his political doctrines in order to rule Syracuse (which means that he tried more than once); that Augustine underwent a long and painful conversion; that Kierkegaard had sentimental problems with his fiancée; that Heidegger had a troubled and passionate love affair with Hannah Arendt—and a more troubling relationship with Nazism; and that Husserl had other (different) troubles with Nazism and difficult relationships with almost all his disciples. Biography is one thing, and philosophy is another; philosophy requires a completely different logic to understand it. D'Andrea immediately provides his condensed biography of MacIntyre, followed by the first chapter of the first section “Re-conceiving Ethical Inquiry: How Not to Conduct Ethical Inquiry.” The two points mentioned above seem to be more than just accidentally intertwined.

D'Andrea, it seems, wishes to avoid any confusion on this point, at the risk of appearing too tough. The methodological distinctions present in the book are more than correct. For our present purposes, therefore, we should concede, for the rule of engagement, that all of MacIntyre's thought is “more or less” presented in this volume. No thinker, however, can demand that his biography be written in a certain way. An “internal perspective” on the life of a philosopher can still be provided in several different ways. Somebody can offer an exhaustive chronology of the questions the philosopher tries to answer, and all the series of arguments, counter-, and counter-counter-arguments that follow. This is how D'Andrea's book works, and it implies that philosophy has to proceed according to a certain autonomous and minimally shared logic, by way of accumulating or discarding arguments according to their soundness.

We are all well aware that some philosophers not only add to an ongoing discussion but also introduce new ways of philosophizing that are subsequently integrated into the core of philosophy itself. So a good introduction to Nietzsche need not be written in a genealogical way, though perhaps we will find that dialogues are not the best way to introduce people to Plato. And yet a scholar has to offer a glimpse of the novelty, say, of phenomenological analysis or of transcendental arguments, to the reader who is hypothetically acquainted only with Aristotle's Organon. So, an internal perspective on MacIntyre's thought must maintain all the ideas that are not proven false or contradictory, and at the same time, explain how this way of thinking should be integrated within the philosophical debate. In the same way, a book could perfectly fit with philosophical truth and yet remain blind to some important proposals that could change the context of the whole of philosophical practice.

D'Andrea explains in chapter 9 that pushed by many of his critics, and particularly by John Haldane, MacIntyre devoted most of his more recent years to analyzing the practice of philosophy as a search for truth. He tried to expand on precisely what D'Andrea assumed as his point of departure, the question of re-conceiving ethical inquiry. MacIntyre introduced something new in philosophy, or, more humbly, he reintroduced a literary genre whose excellence was reached by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives of Philosophers.

After twenty years of philosophical work, MacIntyre was painfully aware he had reached an impasse, but was confident that there was a way out from this situation. What had become more and more essential to his perspective was the defining of the role of the life of the philosopher: considered to be an ordinary person yet one engaged in the pursuit of the good life that is called philosophy, the philosopher gambles his whole life not only as a philosopher but also as a plain person. In other words, what MacIntyre assumes—and as no serious philosopher could fail to assume—is that whenever it is stated that truth is really what is good for human beings, the conclusion is of extreme relevance for him and for the people around him. This requires a certain accountability on the part of the philosopher: the consensus that he, as a philosopher, gives to the application of his arguments is vital—in a situation in which his life or the life of some person dear to him depends on his arguments, or the explanation that he gives for refusing an argument; or the suffering that he experiences because he cannot find a sound answer to some question that he is supposed to answer. His lack of intellectual competence or moral commitment are, in some way, part of his philosophical make-up and give both internal and contextual perspectives, making possible new tasks for the work of reason. It is not simply a matter of explaining himself historically: A reached the conclusion Z, starting from X and going through K instead of Y. MacIntyre spelled out in a particular way the kind of rationality that aligns philosophical conclusions with the goals of his entire life, conceived as a research of good as the good for his entire life. From this point of view, we can understand the very well-known, apparently “procedural” or “empty” definition of the practice of the research of good life given in After Virtue: “To ask ‘What is the good for me?’ is to ask how best I might live out that unity and bring it into completion. To ask ‘what is the good for man?’ is to ask what all answers to the former question must have in common.” This question acquires a new, practical value and dimension, without which we would remain blind to MacIntyre's logic and to some of his apparently trivial or accidental consequences. MacIntyre proposes a new kind of insight on philosophy from within cultures, which transcends their unavoidable situation.

MacIntyre, in a full-fledged explanation in his essay on First Principles (“highly schematic,” according to D'Andrea), assumes that from birth all human beings share implicitly some natural, common archai or principia, literally “starting points,” that need to be developed and involve a necessary direction given to our nous, intellectus, or insight. Human intellect, following Aquinas, is open to reality but incomplete without the complex work of reason. Involved necessarily in a practice of truth, we are pointed toward the good that defines and fulfills us as human beings. MacIntyre's theory comprehends a complex argument that works as a reformulated and post-Nietzschean version of Aristotle's elenchos, like a sort of keystone: the dialectics of traditions that synthesize several, different sources like Aquinas, Peirce, Collingwood, Popper, and some of his disciples. But human experience frequently lacks the perfection that comes from an encounter with reality, an encounter that could show some relevant inadequacies of this reality. There needs to be a connection between the personal experience of the wise man and of the experts in different disciplines. This theory of rationality is what forced MacIntyre back to an analysis of the anthropology and ethics of practical rationality in conjunction with the different forms of desire. However, most of all, it requires the comparison between thinking and the goals of the unified narrative of human life. This helps to explain MacIntyre's deep interest to the life and thought of some, maybe forgotten, thinkers like Stein, Reinach, and Rosenzweig, who can reveal the multiplicity of perspectives of the subject from within a realistic framework of enquiry.

Here we find the wise and experienced man, the phenomenologist, and the expert in other sciences together as plain persons, dealing with the content and the order of human good as a whole. According to MacIntyre, their minds and their desires are essentially social, which means that there is, in the definition of first principle as well as in that of practice, something which should be in some way intrinsically relational and unitive.

The core of this practice is trust, an unavoidable and connatural, ethical demand that can be forgotten in practice but is never completely put aside from any human life or culture. Trust is the substance of all human relationships, a substance that emerges naturally and develops itself through the virtues addressed toward the natural law. It implies a progressive, explicit knowledge of the common good. Therefore, it is possible from the point of view of human beings in relation to the practical order to recover a complete and original theory of virtues because of the retrospective narrative contained in a philosophy and a theology of history (very much indebted to Vico and Newman, and related to a version of Thomistic ontology). Thomas's original interpretation of being, esse, needs the presence of a personal God, to whom human beings are open, thanks to their reason, will, and developed affectivity. All this reflection, exemplified in life of thinkers like Stein, seems to fit perfectly with the tasks assigned to philosophy by MacIntyre in his Selected Essays.

From this point of view, it is possible to understand why D'Andrea's account of MacIntyre is logically correct but still remains “more or less comprehensive.” D'Andrea uses the refined and appealing argument developed in MacIntyre's three works of the 1980s. He finds general validation of a vision of Thomism that implies an account of natural law, a theory of rationality that justifies the superiority of this tradition, and in some way justifies all the previous content of Aquinas's theory of virtues against modernity. But, I dare say, if MacIntyre in his writings after After Virtue reveals himself as an outstanding philosopher and writer, he would not reveal his most important achievements only in some problematic or less obviously brilliant works. MacIntyre proposes an original practice of truth based on mutual trust. Mutual trust is neither a first principle nor an argument. That is why we remain, especially after many centuries of systematic doubt, blind to the situations in which it plays a fundamental role as a new form of contextual proof.

This proposal and its consequences need to be seriously challenged. D'Andrea's introduction remains some steps behind. His accurate distinctions are correct, but bring us back in time to the first pages of After Virtue. Precisely applying MacIntyre's theory to this book, this introduction shows its limits: not the limits of Thomism itself, but the limit of Thomism after MacIntyre.