Abstract

Analytic philosophy began in G.E. Moore's critique of idealist accounts of reality, implicating as dilemmatic F.H. Bradley's identification of the good with self-realization. Neither the tradition of British idealism nor the successor tradition of analytic metaethics was able to sustain the salience previously enjoyed by the concept of good. The essay's second part analyzes Alasdair MacIntyre's account of that longer tradition, and his argument that Aristotelianism's conceptual scheme provides the best solution to modern moral philosophy's dilemma about the human good.