This thesis aims to provide a new definition for philosophy rooted in MacIntyre’s account of a “practice”. In the first chapter, I explain MacIntyre’s concept of a practice as it appears in After Virtue—including its critical components, namely, internal goods, standards of excellence, and the historical dimension of practices—through a consideration of the practice of guitar lutherie. I then use this account to build up an initial definition of philosophy as a practice, and briefly clarify two minor confusions that could easily arise regarding such an account. In my second chapter, I take up MacIntyre’s view that practices are always spatiotemporally situated in order to question whether or not my definition from Chapter One could include non-Western philosophy within it. I argue that this is possible within the peculiar epistemic conditions of modernity, based on a reading of MacIntyre’s paper “Relativism, Power and Philosophy”. In Chapter Three, I consider another key component of MacIntyre’s account—namely, that of institutions—and arrive at some extra qualifications regarding the concepts of both “external goods” and “corruption” to deepen the account, and then introduce my own concept of “institutional hegemony” to account for academia’s present status with regards to the practice of philosophy, which I use to explain a discordance between the present reality of philosophy as a discipline and the conclusions I draw in Chapter Two. I then extend this line of thought in the fourth chapter to look at some objections that could be made against a MacIntyrean view of philosophy-as-a-practice from a feminist and postcolonial lens. These objections are then addressed in the fifth chapter, where I show that the MacIntyrean ought to be in agreement with the feminist and postcolonial projects, and that the MacIntyrean framework can indeed accommodate them.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/43070 |
| Date | 04 January 2022 |
| Creators | Kazakov, Alan |
| Contributors | DeSouza, Nigel |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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