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Abstract

The objective of the paper is to analyze the conception of virtue as represented in the book After Virtue by one of the initiators od the renaissance of the ethics of virtue A. MacIntyre. In its first part the authors examine the reasons of MacIntyreś criticism of the Enlightenment conception of morals, in which the notion of virtue was excluded from moral reflection and substituted by a universal moral principle. The second part gives a more detailed analysis of the notions of practice, narrative order of a single human life and moral tradition embodying according to MacIntyre the explicative background, required for the definition of a unified notion of virtue. The reconstruction of MacIntyreś argumentation serves the clarification of why the option for Aristotelian tradition is for him the only appropriate way of grounding the ethics on a more plausible constitutive notion than that of the rule, preferred by the Enlightenment.