After Virtue

The description of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is as follows: this book was highly controversial when it was first published in 1981, but it has since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In After Virtue, MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to the European Enlightenment, which had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In his search for a way out of this impasse, MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical thinking, that of Aristotle, who emphasized the importance of "virtue" to the ethical life. More than thirty years after its original publication, After Virtue remains a work that is impossible to ignore for anyone interested in our understanding of ethics and morality today.