People how lay claim to truth must embrace transcendence. In claiming to hold the truth, one is claiming that one’s assertions can be vindicated by more than parochial standards of rational justification.
We are not only acknowledging that our best beliefs might be false, nor even that our best concepts and theories might fail us as the terms in which we should see the world, but even that our best understanding of what rational justification consists in might be inadequate to the tasks we face.
Thus, for MacIntyre, the claim to truth, far from being an arrogant claim to be piercing the veil of what we could possibly know, is a humble admission that our best efforts to understand may well fail to grasp how the world is. Claiming truth is the way we take on the risk of radical human fallibility.
A central task of philosophy, for MacIntyre, is to grasp this vulnerability and make it explicit. It is not that we can somehow stand outside our intellectual or moral tradition and evaluate it from a neutral standpoint, but that every vibrant tradition has within it tensions and conflicts, and these can be probed with shrewd use of the philosophical and moral imagination. The best minds, precisely by their commitment to truth, will be open to challenges from rival traditions. One of the rivalries that most concerns him is that which has opened up in modernity between secular and religious cultures:
It is not always possible to find … common ground and sometimes this is a consequence of the fact that no one engages in philosophy without being influenced by their extra philosophical allegiances, religious, moral, political and otherwise. What is important here is twofold: first, not to disguise such allegiances as philosophical conclusions and, secondly, to make their influence on one’s philosophical work explicit. The first is a danger that threatens those who fail to recognise, for example, that atheism requires an act of faith just as much as theism does and that physicalism is as liable to be held superstitiously as any religious view. The second is necessary, if one is to clarify the relationship between one’s philosophical and one’s other commitments.
It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to which we aspire truth about the human good is of particular importance. We move towards that truth by asking what, if anything, the meaning of our lives is, what place suffering has in our lives, and whether or not death is the terminus of those lives.
We are not only acknowledging that our best beliefs might be false, nor even that our best concepts and theories might fail us as the terms in which we should see the world, but even that our best understanding of what rational justification consists in might be inadequate to the tasks we face.
Thus, for MacIntyre, the claim to truth, far from being an arrogant claim to be piercing the veil of what we could possibly know, is a humble admission that our best efforts to understand may well fail to grasp how the world is. Claiming truth is the way we take on the risk of radical human fallibility.
A central task of philosophy, for MacIntyre, is to grasp this vulnerability and make it explicit. It is not that we can somehow stand outside our intellectual or moral tradition and evaluate it from a neutral standpoint, but that every vibrant tradition has within it tensions and conflicts, and these can be probed with shrewd use of the philosophical and moral imagination. The best minds, precisely by their commitment to truth, will be open to challenges from rival traditions. One of the rivalries that most concerns him is that which has opened up in modernity between secular and religious cultures:
Dialogue returns us to our condition as reflective questioning and self-questioning animals, rather than as those helplessly in the grip of their own particular beliefs. Philosophical dialogue is a remedy for that loss of questioning and self-questioning which characterises so much of belief in secularised societies, whether it is the unreflective and complacent unbelief of those who are tacitly and complacently dismissive of religious belief or the unreflective and complacent loud-mouthed belief of fundamentalists of every faith.
It is not always possible to find … common ground and sometimes this is a consequence of the fact that no one engages in philosophy without being influenced by their extra philosophical allegiances, religious, moral, political and otherwise. What is important here is twofold: first, not to disguise such allegiances as philosophical conclusions and, secondly, to make their influence on one’s philosophical work explicit. The first is a danger that threatens those who fail to recognise, for example, that atheism requires an act of faith just as much as theism does and that physicalism is as liable to be held superstitiously as any religious view. The second is necessary, if one is to clarify the relationship between one’s philosophical and one’s other commitments.
It is characteristic of human beings that, whatever our culture, we desire to know and to understand, that we cannot but set ourselves the achievement of truth as a goal. And among the truths to which we aspire truth about the human good is of particular importance. We move towards that truth by asking what, if anything, the meaning of our lives is, what place suffering has in our lives, and whether or not death is the terminus of those lives.
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