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Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (The Paul Carus Lectures)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 170
EAN: 9780812694529
ISBN: 081269452X
Label: Open Court
Manufacturer: Open Court
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 180
Publication Date: May 18, 2001
Publisher: Open Court
Studio: Open Court
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Editorial Review:
To flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. In this book, a leading moral philosopher presents a comparison of humans to other animals and explores the impact of these virtues.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Interesting but Incoherent
An interesting and generally accessible work by the well known philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre is known well for his denunciation of the moral bankruptcy of the modern world and his embrace of an Aristotleian/Thomistic account of virtue ethics. This book is an effort to provide a positive account of a desirable life and sketch out a form of political philosophy. MacIntyre begins this book with a fairly straightforward discussion of how at least some non-human animals and humans are not ... Read More
Rating:  - Philosophical account for the need of virtues as to animals and humans
Alasdair Macintire, well known for several renowned philosophical books, for example "After virtue". He is an authority on the issue of virtues and Aristotelian philosophy, where virtue plays an inmportant role. What is striking about this book however, is that recent research done on dolphins, chimpanzees and other intelligent nonhuman animals, has been taken notice of by the author. This includes self consciousness and rationality. He, in an excellent way, made these insights philsophically relevant ... Read More
Rating:  - Unflinching attempt to address fundamental questions
Many virtue theorists seem to think it enough to say that "qua humans" we should flourish, and that figuring out how to flourish "just is" what practical reasoning is, and hence that virtue is intrinsic to being human in about the same way that having roots is intrinsic to being a tree, and that those of us who fail to "see" that are somehow irrational in wanting some further argument. They skip blithely over the obvious fact that much reasoning that seems quite practical and ... Read More
Rating: - Okay, so I was wrong
I take back my previous review, in which I speculated that MacIntyre had "gone soft." On second and third reading, this is just a wonderful book - a welcome return to ambitious Aristotelian naturalism in ethics. So much better than "After Virtue".
Rating: - Has MacIntyre gone soft?
This book is more moving than it is carefully argued. There's lots of unsupported assertion, and the detailed account of our need for the virtues is full of holes. But the approach is an attractive one. And this is a book of philosophical ethics that betrays a real concern for our frailties. Unlike a lot of dry philosophy, you get the sense that ethics really matters.
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