Simon and Sacha at Nantes Chateau, where the Edict of Nantes was signed (so they say).Alasdair MacIntyre's Gifford Lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry begins with an observation about the experience of delivering the lectures themselves: that the debate elicited responses that varied according to the rational systems deployed by the participants. As he notes:
...nothing is more striking in the contemporary university than the extent of the apparently ineliminable continuing divisions and conflicts within all humanistic enquiry ... p. 6
What we really experience I guess is more like a 'multi-versity', where the clash of theoretical commitments rings out accross the campus. Or, perhaps, as MacIntyre suspects, the only engagements that occur are between people who already share the same rational commitments. This might be accross disciplines - and the disagreements may run through individual disciplines. MacIntyre goes on:
Hence debate between fundamentally opposed standpoints does occur; but it is inevitably inconclusive. Each warring position characteristically appears irrefutable to its own adherents; indeed in its own terms and by its own standards of argument it IS in practice irrefutable. But each warring position equally seems to its opponents to be insufficiently warranted by rational argument.
And then, the interesting bit:
It is ironic that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition which led their nineteenth century secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline. p. 7
This attack on theology still goes on of course...and yet, is political philosophy any different (for example)?
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