Introduction

Summary

In the introduction to his now classic book, After Virtue, Aladair MacIntyre proposed a striking thought experiment. Suppose that the study of the natural sciences is prohibited. Then, generations later, a movement emerges with the aim of reviving them – but by this point nobody has any scientific training, and “fragments” of books and articles are all that remain. What would happen next? According to MacIntyre, many people would begin using scientific terms and ideas in conversation. They would argue over “the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and phlogiston theory.” But what it actually meant to do scientific research would remain ungraspable. “Almost nobody” would realize “that what they are doing is not natural science … at all.”¹