This chapter proposes a way of thinking about virtue theory that draws from Aristotle and Alasdair MacIntyre, but also moves beyond them. The central question is what a virtue theory might look like which is not universalistic, but rather culturally inclusive, pragmatic, and situational. A theme throughout is the importance of thinking about education as the process through which virtues are formed, sustained, and improved over time.

Jeffrey Gore’s entry on technē offers a survey of diverse workers throughout Shakespeare’s writing: artisans, lawyers, medical doctors, and educators. It situates the Greek word technē – meaning “technical expertise,” “craft,” or “skill” – within Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics as both a pedagogical model (“the craft analogy”) and a marker of social class among different laborers, from “leather apron” craftspeople to elite Latin learners and modern teachers of the liberal arts. In brief accounts of Hannah Arendt’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings on Aristotle, the entry addresses how technē was often believed incompatible with some ancient and early modern notions of citizenship and demonstrates how many of Shakespeare’s characters – such as the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – challenge us to understand the role of craft in facilitating artistic expression and strengthening political community.

This chapter investigates the conditions for dialogue between science and religion, and asks what makes dialogue possible or desirable. Sometimes, dialogue has simply amounted to theology and religion accommodating themselves to the sciences, and this can serve to reinforce unhelpful ways of categorising science and religion. Different models for dialogue are suggested by past relations between natural philosophy and religion, understood as formative practices (rather than proposition-generating activities). An alternative approach is also suggested by the problem of incommensurability, initially applied in different ways by Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and Alasdair MacIntyre to the relations between competing scientific frameworks, but which is also applicable also to science–religion relations. Thinking of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ in terms of historical traditions, to use MacIntyre’s expression, leads to a different understanding of their possible relationships. Historical and sociological descriptions of scientific and religious practices, in short, should play a more prominent role in our understandings of sciences, religions, and their relations.

I seek to establish the claim that we are fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal through an exploration of the engaged standpoint from within our human form of life, where it can be seen that our human form of life is shaped by “strong evaluative meaning,” that is, meaning or value that involves qualitative distinction (e.g., between higher and lower, noble and base, sacred and profane, etc.) and places normative demands upon us. I also show how this dimension of meaning is overlooked by the dominant neo-Aristotelian approach because of its emphasis on a disengaged standpoint on our human form of life rather than an engaged standpoint and, thus, it does not provide us with an adequate philosophical anthropology and along with this it does not provide us with an adequate account of our reasons for the life of virtue. Moreover, I seek to counter a disenchanting move made by such neo-Aristotelians that involves denying any special realm of obligation. There is such a realm, I argue, and it is the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning, which includes more than just the domain of “the moral” narrowly construed as concerned with what we owe to others.

I discuss how strong evaluative meaning makes an important difference for a proper account of the nature and extent of the demands for other-regarding concern. The dominant neo-Aristotelian approach has regarded the other-regarding virtues (e.g., justice, generosity, honesty, etc.) as virtues primarily because of their role in promoting the “good functioning of our social group,” which is seen as important for achieving our own flourishing as rational social animals. I focus especially on MacIntyre’s account of other-regarding concern as rooted in social networks of giving and receiving in his book Dependent Rational Animals. What is overlooked in the dominant approach is the strong evaluative sense of human beings as being worthy of our concern for their own sake due to their inherent dignity (or sanctity) and that a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life can be achieved through such concern. I seek to show the difference this makes for ensuring that we regard all human beings as fully amongst us, for making sense of and defending moral absolutes, and for properly responding to the demands of universal and particular concern.