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.

Prologue to the Third Edition Preface 1. A Disquieting Suggestion 2. The Nature of Moral Agreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism 3. Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context 4. The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality 5. Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail 6. Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project 7. 'Fact', Explanation and Expertise 8. The Character of Generalizations in Social Science and their Lack of Predictive Power 9. Nietzsche or Aristotle? 10. The Virtues in Heroic Societies 11. The Virtues at Athens 12. Aristotle's Account of the Virtues 13. Medieval Aspects and Occasions 14. The Nature of the Virtues 15. The Virtues, The Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition 16. From the Virtues to Virtue and After Virtue 17. Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions 18. After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle, Trotsky and St Benedict 19. Postscript Bibliography Index.