Highly controversial when it was first published in 1981 Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has
since established itself as a landmark work in contemporary moral philosophy. In this book
MacIntyre sought to address a crisis in moral language that he traced back to a European
Enlightenment that had made the formulation of moral principles increasingly difficult. In the
search for a way out of this impasse MacIntyre returns to an earlier strand of ethical
thinking that of Aristotle who emphasised 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.
