[Start time is in UTC: Click here for the start time in your local time zone.]

This event will be held on Zoom: Click here to access the meeting.

An online event featuring two presentations:

MacIntyre and the Aesthetic Critique of Liberalism
Michael O’Neill, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Providence College

Informed by recent work on the moral and aesthetic implications of MacIntyre’s theory of practices and narrative in After Virtue and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, I plan to situate this work, and MacIntyre’s AV and ECM, within a tradition of aesthetic critiques of liberalism. With reference to Nietzsche and Umberto Eco, I argue that MacIntyre's theory of practices and narrative can function as the basis for principles of aesthetics that may function to help reform community life within neoliberalism.  

Locating the Invisible Man: Determining Visibility and Values in Luc Tuymans’ Der Architekt
Simon Willems, Lecturer in Art, University of Reading 

Alasdair MacIntyre’s characterisation of the emotivist  manager hinges on the assumption that bureaucrats are ‘necessarily’ Weberian. MacIntyre’s argument stems from the claim that the realm of facts, means, and measurable effectiveness, forecloses the possibility of values. Yet MacIntyre’s characterisation is rooted in the Fordist era of Scientific Management in which he himself grew up. In this paper, I consider how the portrait of Albert Speer Der Architekt (1997-1998) by the Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, allows us to reassess MacIntyre’s claims. Sourced from home movie footage of Speer with his wife on a skiing holiday, Tuymans’ painting shows the Nazi minister turning towards the camera lens, having collapsed on a bed of snow. Speaking to the ‘humanistic’ principles of management which underpinned his leadership style, Speer appeals to the viewer through a veil of recognised vulnerability; flagging up the question of visibility where Tuymans deploys a mask, screening out Speer’s expression. In situating Tuymans ‘distrust of the image’, Der Architekt reframes Speer, revising MacIntyre’s thesis whilst deepening its contours; anticipating the move towards ‘human’ values that informed the ‘cultural turn’ in management thinking in the 1980s.