You Tube Theology

Prof. Jennifer Herdt speaking at the Hegel & MacIntyre Conference 2022.

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Sponsored by the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought and the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.

From Freedom to Final End: MacIntyre’s Hegelian Aristotle

Early in his career, MacIntyre embraced a Hegelian notion of freedom as the human essence, realizable only through social practices and institutions for which persons have taken collective responsibility. Even at this point, MacIntyre is inclined to interpret freedom through Aristotelian spectacles, as the happiness made possible by desires transformed in and for community. While talk of Hegel recedes in tandem with MacIntyre’s disillusionment with Marxism, MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism, and later his Thomism, retain a marked Hegelian flavor; the quest for the final good, for the universal, unfolds through sorting through the social roles and practices and conceptions of human flourishing that have formed and de-formed us. All of this comes into clearer focus with MacIntyre's return to Marxism in Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. What remains unresolved, I argue, is whether MacIntyre’s account is metaphysical in the ways that post-Kantian Hegelians reject.