Despite Alasdair MacIntyre being known as an academic who has made many notable contributions
to a range of areas in philosophy his thinking on education is not as well-known and or
properly understood by most audiences and readerships that predominantly reside in educational
contexts. With this in mind this book aims to provide a critique of MacIntyre's thinking about
education and hence commences with a central theme found in MacIntyre's extensive corpus
concerning the fragmentation and disunification of ideas found in our culture and society that
stems both from the rejection of metaphysics and what it means to be a human being living
within the context of history. According to MacIntyre part of the problem why this has
occurred is due to educational institutions particularly universities failing to resist the
pressure exerted from industry and the state to conform. Unfortunately this has resulted in a
type of intellectual dissensus where the shared conceptions of rationalenquiry and the role of
reason have been replaced by pluralistic notions of private and personal choices concerning the
good and a disillusionment with reason that is ultimately exhibited as apathy and conformism.
In order to overcome this apathy and conformism found in our culture and society MacIntyre's
educational project is concerned with the cultivation of rationality however this is not an
easy undertaking because it involves students being confronted with alternative - sometimes
rather hostile - rival traditions so they both come to see rival points of view and understand
that each tradition including their own does not come from a neutral or value-neutral
standpoint. To MacIntyre dialectical encounters between traditions is a crucial starting point
of a good education but for intellectual and academic progress to be made rational enquiry
needs to be grounded in a shared understanding of first principles that aims at truth and
rational vindication. It is this shift in thinking that is of interest in the latter part of
this book particularly MacIntyre's views around tradition-orientated communities of practice.
Here MacIntyre is concerned with the praxis of his educational project and the crucial role
tradition-orientated communities play in the cultivation of independent reasoners who are
capable of seeing the interconnectedness between different forms of knowledge that can lead us
to an informed discovery of both the truth and of the good but most importantly exhibit
virtuous dispositions which are vital to good practical reasoning.
