Abstract
From the moment we abandoned Aristotle's teleology, MacIntyre believes, there has been no proper moral philosophy, but only philosophers "working ... with bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and useful." In other words we live in a world where philosophy is in a state of great confusion, whereas it was once rational and unified. So was, MacIntyre believes, the ancient Greek polis which was articulated according to Aristotle's tripartite scheme; ethics (third element) showed human-beings how to live a good life, that is to say how to pass from the state of man-as he-is (first element) to the state of man-as-he-should-be (second element). Such teleology was based on Aristotle's metaphysical assumptions upon the nature of human-beings, so when his metaphysics was discarded, his teleology was similarly put in question. The Enlightenment philosophers definitely rejected this notion of telos when trying to secularize bases for morality.
