Dunne and Pádraig Hogan

Over the past quarter of a century the work of few philosophers has exerted such powerful influence, or been the centre of such vigorous debate, as that of Alasdair MacIntyre. And although MacIntyre has not often formally addressed educational issues, the thrust of his writing has seemed to bear more clearly on education than that of most philosophers. His assault on central tenets of the Enlightenment in After Virtue already contained an implicit critique of public education in the modern era. That critique was extended and made more explicit in later writings such as his Richard Peters Lecture ‘The Idea of an Educated Public’ (1987), the concluding chapters of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), the final chapter of Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and the essay ‘Aquinas’s Critique of Education: Against his Age, Against Ours’ (1998). With less polemical intensity he furnished some further arguments on education and upbringing in his book Dependent Rational Animals (1999a). And his most recent comments on the subject are presented in the dialogue published in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (MacIntyre and Dunne, 2002). Moreover, even in his most critical writing MacIntyre has also developed an affirmative vision that has seemed to offer resources for a fruitful reconceptualisation of education: his steady concern with human flourishing, strongly linked to his own distinctive conceptions of virtue and of practice, as well as to his ideas of the biographical unity of a life and the encompassing power of traditions, flows easily into discourse about the aims of education and the kind of undertaking engaged in by teachers. While this whole body of writing provides a context for the papers collected here, the recent dialogue on education in this journal provides their more immediate occasion. There MacIntyre restated some of his characteristic positions: his opposition to the prevailing culture of Western modernity, his refusal of any genuinely moral role to the liberal democratic state, and his conception of the imperilled state of contemporary education—as well as his continuing belief in the personal and political indispensability of the intellectual and moral virtues, the narrative structure of a human life, and the need, one way or another, to reckon with different and rival traditions. But he also made some claims that might not have not been anticipated and that can hardly avoid proving controversial for philosophers of education, even—or perhaps especially—for some who are broadly sympathetic to his work. Chief among these is the claim that, for all the illuminative power of his notion of ‘practice’, not least with respect to professions such as medicine or Journal of Philosophy of Education, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2003