Rationality

To be rational, that is, is not to follow reason’s timeless principles but to participate in the tradition’s particular shape of rationality as it has developed through history: “The participant in a craft is rational qua participant insofar as he or she conforms to the best standards of reason discovered so far, and the rationality in which he or she thus shares is always, therefore . . . understood as a historically situated rationality” (64–65). Rationality is thus learning a particularized skill in the midst of time.“—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 182 (quotations from Alasdair MacIntyre's 1988 Gifford Lectures)