Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Dependent Rational Animals
Humans as rational dependent animals — vulnerability and disability not as exceptions but as central to ethical-political reflection. The virtues of acknowledged dependence
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Dependent Rational Animals (Late (the explicit Thomist completion of the After Virtue trilogy)) |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Non-Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Partial |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Both |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | Personal |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Tradition |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Continuous |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Dependent Rational Animals
The temporal unfolding of a dependent rational animal's life — infancy, adulthood, aging — as the medium of the virtues.
Space
Dependent Rational Animals
The local communities of giving and receiving in which the rational animal actually lives.
Matter
Dependent Rational Animals
The animal body as the substrate of human life; embodiment as essential to rationality and to the experience of dependence.
Observer
Dependent Rational Animals
The dependent rational animal — embodied, plural, both active and passive in the networks of giving and receiving. Personal-providential God as ultimate framework.
Energy
Dependent Rational Animals
The energies of human flourishing — biological, social, intellectual, spiritual — integrated in the rational animal.
Information
Dependent Rational Animals
The wisdom of practical communities preserved through their traditions of acknowledged dependence.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Dependent Rational Animals represents a qualification of After Virtue — MacIntyre acknowledges that After Virtue underestimated biological-animal aspects of human flourishing. How substantial the qualification is, and whether it reorders or merely supplements the earlier framework, has been a continuing question in MacIntyre scholarship. The book's engagement with disability studies has been welcomed by some disability theorists and criticised by others as too quickly subsuming the disability experience into Aristotelian-Thomistic categories.