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“... The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not so plain persons who are professors of English or History or Physics – as vaguely ludicrous. On the one hand, academic philosophy is centrally concerned with such all-pervasive concepts as those of truth, rationality and goodness: and who, whether in other academic disciplines or in the transactions of everyday life, can disown an implicit commitment, at the very least, to some view of what rational justification consists in, and of what constitutes sound evidence for a belief, and who, consequently, can avoid admitting to a certain vulnerability to the conclusions of professional philosophers on these matters? Yet, on the other hand, the level at which academic philosophers treat these questions often appears to outsiders – including some philosophers themselves in their off-duty moments – as disturbingly abstract and unrealistic ...”

“... A few years ago there was a vogue in the social sciences for a certain type of real-life experiment. Experimental subjects were, for example, coached to exhibit the symptoms of psychiatric disorders and then presented themselves for admission to mental hospitals: could the psychiatrists tell which were the fake patients and which were the real ones? Some school-teachers were falsely informed that certain of their new pupils had high IQ scores: could the teachers tell which were the children with genuinely high scores from those about whom the information was false, what was the effect on their treatment of the children, and more important, the effect on the children? A skilled actor pretended to be a visiting professor and delivered a lecture on a subject of which he knew nothing and his academic audience was invited to evaluate it, to see if they could tell nonsense from sense in a subject other than their own ...”

“... It is no secret that philosophy as it is taught and studied at UCLA or Princeton or Oxford is very different from philosophy as it is understood at Paris or Dijon or Nice. An intellectual milieu in which the household names include those of Quine, Strawson, Davidson and Kripke is unlikely to have much in common with one where Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida are taken with great seriousness ...”

“... It is a long time​ now since any undergraduate class used Mill’s An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, first published in 1865, as a set text. But it has happened. George Santayana, who graduated from Harvard College in 1886, has described in Persons and Places the teaching of Francis Bowen: But Harvard possessed safe, sober old professors also and oldest of all, ‘Fanny’ Bowen ...”

“... When the name of a present-day Catholic theologian becomes familiar to the larger reading public, it is rarely because of his theology. Most often it is because he has been made vivid as a character in one of those miniature scenarios about religion which still fascinate the ostensibly secularised mind. Jean Daniélou’s fine book on the doctrine of the Trinity passed largely unnoticed: his death in circumstances which suggested that there might be a scandal to be unearthed secured the immediate attention of journalists all over the world ...”

“... Garry Wills has two distinct aims in this book. He wishes to demythologise American beliefs about the Declaration of Independence in order to discredit the view that the United States is founded upon an idea, upon a set of moral beliefs. In so doing, he is trying to refute, not only external commentators such as G.K. Chesterton, who wrote that ‘America is the only nation in the world founded upon a creed,’ but more importantly a central American tradition whose hero and spokesman is Lincoln ...”

“... When the Scottish radical lawyer, Thomas Muir, was tried before the infamous Lord Braxfield in 1793, he declared that if what he had advocated was treasonable, then Plato, Harrington and David Hume were equally guilty. To the present-day student of Hume, Muir’s inclusion of him in his catalogue of reformers must appear even odder than his appeal to Plato: for Hume is usually and rightly portrayed as a consistent defender of the 18th-century Hanoverian status quo ...”

“... Locke, Berkeley and Hume were three very different philosophers with very different preoccupations, modes of argument and attitudes towards the world. But by the middle of the 19th century it had become the custom to view them as the successive representatives of a single empiricist tradition. It is the English rather than the British who excel in the invention of traditions ...”

“... Philosophy, religion, science,’ wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘they are all of them busy nailing things down ... But the novel, no ... If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, it either kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail!’ Hence Lawrence’s conclusion that only the novel can now do for us what philosophy once aspired to do: Plato’s Dialogues were queer little novels ...”

“... In a previous book, After Justice, which came out in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that the ideas of justice available in the modern world are like a pile of ruins, historical fragments that can make no coherent sense. Politicians, reformers, administrators, appeal in a haphazard way to items in this deposit ...”

“... objective truth, that truth is a superstition we no longer need and would be better off without. Alasdair MacIntyre’s original volume of selected essays, published 35 years ago, had the title Against the Self-images of the Age. The idea that we can live without truth is the current self-image he has set himself against. ...”

“... In​ 2009, University College Dublin put on a conference for Alasdair MacIntyre to mark his eightieth birthday. The range of participants reflected the breadth of his interests: professional philosophers, social radicals (with a scattering of Marxists), Cardinal Cahal Daly and a coachload of Catholic students from Louvain ...”

“... is evidently with Anthelia. There is nonetheless some force to Mrs Pinmoney’s reply. What makes Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue such an exciting book is the intensity with which he feels the weight of each side in this dialogue, the claims of moral aspiration and the dottily anachronistic and unreal quality of most of such aspiration in the face of ...”

“... chosen by Stephen Holmes for dissection in his Anatomy. The others are Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch and Roberto Unger. To choose Maistre as one’s point of departure is to set a provocative, not to say lurid tone. There are occasions when he can sound as reasonable in his critique of the Revolution or the ...”

“... attitudes towards our post-Enlightenment culture. His project has been widely linked with that of Alasdair MacIntyre’s recent writings, which also use the history of ideas about morality and value to gain a critical perspective both on current moral philosophy and on post-Enlightenment culture. ...”