Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (1929— ) Alasdair MacIntyre is a Scottish born, British educated, moral and political philosopher who has worked in the United States since 1970. His work in ethics and politics reaches across disciplines, drawing on sociology and philosophy of the social sciences as well as Greek and Latin classical literature. MacIntyre began his career as a Marxist, but in the late 1950s, he

Metaphor and Phenomenology The term “contemporary phenomenology” refers to a wide area of 20th and 21st century philosophy in which the study of the structures of consciousness occupies center stage. Since the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and subsequent developments in phenomenology and hermeneutics after Husserl, it has no longer been possible to view consciousness as a simple scientific object of study. It

Infinitism in Epistemology This article provides an overview of infinitism in epistemology. Infinitism is a family of views in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. It contrasts naturally with coherentism and foundationalism. All three views agree that knowledge or justification requires an appropriately structured chain of reasons. What form may such a chain take? Foundationalists opt for non-repeating finite chains. Coherentists (at

Frege’s Problem: Referential Opacity The problem of referential opacity is to explain why a certain inference rule of classical logic sometimes produces invalid-seeming inferences when applied to ascriptions of mental states. The rule concerns substitution of terms for the same object, and here is one of the controversial examples. It involves the mental states of Lois Lane, who believes that Superman can fly. However, she