After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre

Literally all ethics since the Greeks has been based on a misunderstanding: we literally cannot have a successful theory of ethics given our modern premises -- we're LARPing, we're cargo-culting, we're fucking around.

My god guys this book is WILD. You know how most academic writing goes "while further resarch is needed, I argue that the possibility that eighteenth century mackerel were (on average) slightly saltier than modern mackerel may in fact be more likely than many scholars anticipate"?

By contrast, MacIntyre comes in blazing from the very beginning: every famous philosopher since the Greeks is wrong, or not-even-wrong, because they're using words that used to mean something in a framework where they can no longer have those meanings.

I'm not really smart-or-knowledgeable enough to describe or explain this book; I'll try to find a summary I can link here, but if you're reading this sentence I forgot to actually do that.

I'm kind of uncertain about the value of reading things that are over your head. On some level maybe you can learn that way, even if you don't understand the thing overall -- maybe part of becoming smarter is wrestling with hard things and trying to connect the small portions you do understand and therefore doing actual, internal work in a way that reading easier things doesn't provide?

But... probably not, to be honest? Probably I'd be better off with scaffolding, if I had a framework for this book that would let me actually understand the details and the argument? I wonder how much of my learning-time is "wasted" due to the randomness of my reading material, how much it could be improved if I first acquired structures and outlines and only then jumped into details.