Alasdair MacIntyrewhom Newsweek has called "one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world"here presents his 1988 Gifford Lectures as an expansion of his earlier work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? He begins by considering the cultural and philosophical distance dividing Lord Gifford's late nineteenth-century world from our own. The outlook of that earlier world, MacIntyre claims, was definitively articulated in the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, which conceived of moral enquiry as both providing insight into and continuing the rational progress of mankind into ever greater enlightenment. MacIntyre compares that conception of moral enquiry to two rival conceptions also formulated in the late nineteenth century: that of Nietzsche's Zur Genealogie der Moral and that expressed in the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII Aeterni Patris.

The lectures focus on Aquinas's integration of Augustinian and Aristotelian modes of enquiry, the inability of the encyclopaedists' standpoint to withstand Thomistic or genealogical criticism, and the problems confronting the contemporary post-Nietzschean genealogist. MacIntyre concludes by considering the implications for education in universities and colleges.

阿拉斯代爾·麥金太爾(Alasdair MacIntyre，1929-)是活躍在英美哲學界、倫理學界的著名哲學傢、倫理學傢，德性倫理學的主要代錶人物。早年就讀於英國曼徹斯特大學，先後執教於英國的曼徹斯特大學、利茲大學，美國的波士頓大學、維特比德大學等多所大學，擔任過社會學和思想史教授、哲學和政治學教授，現執教於美國鹿特丹大學哲學係，是該校哲學係的麥剋馬洪和哈剋榮譽席教授。麥金太爾自50年代起，發錶瞭大量著述，主要著作有：《馬剋思主義與基督教》(1953年)、《論無意識》(1957年)、《倫理學簡史》(1966年)、《對時代自我形像的批判》(1971年)、《追尋美德》(1981年)，《誰之正義？何種閤理性？》(1988年)。