No True Scotsman Disregards the Enlightenment. Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of the Enlightenment Project

Abstrakt

Alasdair MacIntyre, being one of the most notorious critics of the Enlightenment project, does not deny good intentions of those who created values of what we today call the Enlightenment project. Criticising emotivism that stems from the values of the Enlightenment project, he does not claim that the Enlightenment itself destroyed European culture of ethics or that it intended to turn the way of thinking about ethics upside down. Yet, MacIntyre claims that moral philosophy before the Enlightenment and after it are two distinctive systems, the second one being in a constant process of corrupting.

What is the most important in the paper is showing that for MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project was an attempt to justify traditional European morality, but it was a failed attempt. It was because the universe as a unified structure perceived by a human as such became partitioned and knowledge of it divided into many disciplined. This disintegration, reinforced by the Enlightenment, is the very core of anything that Alasdair MacIntyre ever sees as a vice in moral philosophising.