"Political Philosophy of Technology & Alasdair MacIntyre - Talk 1"

Professor Mitcham is a philosopher of engineering and technology, Professor Emeritus (Ee-MARE-uh-tus ) of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines and Visiting International Professor of Philosophy of Technology at Renmin University of China.
Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the foremost contemporary moral philosophers and his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory is a pivotal text in contemporary moral theory. He is the leading exponent for a revival of virtue theory in ethics.
The present paper aims to situate After Virtue chronologically in the MacIntyre corpus, identify the structure of its pivotal historical-philosophical argument (along with a few stylistic features), and then raise questions about MacIntyre’s relationship to some structurally similar critiques of modernity, particularly those of Martin Heidegger and Leo Strauss, and the challenge of modern technology to the ethical and the political.