Agenbite of Inwit

The Chris Lydon interview appears here, now.

As my head rested on the pillow last night I remembered an ill-considered (more to the point: unconsidered) expression. I gave a very harsh description of Alasdair MacIntyre’s writing style, an opprobrious description that a humbler and more thoughtful interviewee would have avoided. I assume Prof. MacIntyre has better things to do than listen to me on the radio, but if he was slacking last night and hears of this, I tender a heartfelt and embarrassed apology.

In my defense, Chris Lydon was rushing the interview at that point, and I was grasping at straws, trying to come up with authors whom I would recommend to the particular audience he seems to have attracted. I wanted to indicate my respect for MacIntyre, but to caution the radio audience that several orders of magnitude of readability separate his books from, let’s say, anything Christopher Hitchens has published. I was thinking particularly of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, a particularly convincing-but-very-dense book. Sadly, that’s not what I said.

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