SYP blogging I: Introduction

This summer, for my Ph.D programme, I'm required to write a `Second-year paper'. Roughly, this is a 8,000 word paper suitable for publication in a general-interest journal of academic philosophy. My paper will be a revision of one of my term papers from last Fall, on similarities between the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, preeminent Notre Dame ethicist, and Helen Longino, feminist philosopher of science currently at Stanford.

As part of this project, I'm reading what is arguably MacIntyre's magnum opus, Whose justice? Which rationality? (henceforth simply WJ?). This is an extremely dense book, and I'll be spending some time blogging interesting and difficult points here. Later in the summer, I hope to blog rereading the other three primary texts in the project: Longino's Science as social knowledge (SSK) and Fate of knowledge (FK), and MacIntyre's After virtue (AV). All four of these texts deserve the status of classics in their respective areas of philosophy.