These thinkers dismantle the philosophical foundations of modernity.
Alasdair MacIntyre – Virtue Ethics & Anti-Liberalism
Essential Works:
- After Virtue – Critique of Enlightenment morality
- Whose Justice? Which Rationality? – Tradition-constituted rationality
- Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry – Genealogy of ethical traditions
Key Ideas:
- Narrative selfhood – We are embedded in stories, traditions, communities
- Virtue ethics – Not rules, but cultivation of character
- Tradition-constituted rationality – No neutral standpoint; all thinking is within a tradition
- After the Enlightenment – We live in moral fragments, and only a return to Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition can restore coherence
MacIntyre is the most rigorous philosophical critique of liberal modernity. He shows why Enlightenment morality fails.
Christopher Dawson – Catholic Historian
Essential Works:
- Religion and the Rise of Western Culture
- The Crisis of Western Education
- Progress and Religion
Key Ideas:
- Religion as foundation of culture – Culture is the outward expression of religious vision
- Medieval Christendom as high point – Before fragmentation of Reformation and secularization
- Secularism as cultural death – Without transcendent foundation, culture collapses
Dawson shows historically how Christianity created Western civilization—and how its loss destroys it.