PHILOSOPHICAL RATIONALITY, SCIENTIFIC RATIONALITY AND THE LIMITS OF THE ANALYTIC TRADITION: A CONTRIBUTION TO ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S THEORY OF TRADITIONS OF RATIONAL ENQUIRY.
MacIntyre, Alasdair Chalmers (1929-); rationality; metaphilosophy; analytic philosophy(criticism of); philosophy of science and philosophy of nature; St. Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1224-1274); Thomism.
Alasdair MacIntyre’s theory of the traditions of rational enquiry elaborates a metaphilosophical perspective from which one can evaluate the relative merits of rival frameworks of rationality within philosophy in a way that resembles some canonical approaches in the philosophy of science, however in such a way as to avoid as much as possible the problems relating to the understanding of theoretic progress as the restrictions proper to relativist and perspectivist positions, so that it allows, on the one hand, a clear sight of the conditionings which operate on the investigation and, on the other, to assume a strictly realist posture anchored in a conception of truth as adequation of mind to reality. As a matter of fact, it finds itself associated to his defense of a “classical” understanding of philosophical reason, specifically an alignment to the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition. From this departure point, through some adjustments made on some of MacIntyre’s theses, it is possible to consider casting an eye on the commitments of analytic philosophy which shall allow for a comprehensive critique of such tradition. It will be necessary to distinguish between the defining aspects of philosophical and of a scientific rationality, pointing out that the latter is incapable of exhibiting the needed resources for building a substantive account of philosophical rationality. Thence the matter shall be considered of how could the scientific rationality model be defining of the mode of enquiry within the analytic philosophical tradition, without it thereby turning out to be directly assumed as a common thesis or unitary methodology and it will be shown why the resulting view ends up being an essentially defective kind of philosophical rationality.