Julius Kovesi was a moral philosopher contemporary with Alasdair
MacIntyre, and dealing with many of the same questions as MacIntyre.
In our view, Kovesi’s moral philosophy is rich in ideas and worth revisiting.
MacIntyre agrees: Kovesi’s Moral Notions, he has said, is ‘a minor classic in
moral philosophy that has not yet received its due’. Kovesi was not a
thinker whose work fits readily into any one tradition. Unlike the later
MacIntyre, he was not a Thomistic Aristotelian, nor even an Aristotelian.
He saw his viewpoint as Platonic, or perhaps more accurately as Socratic.
His writings, unlike MacIntyre’s, have little to say about justice. However,
Kovesi did offfer a theory of practical reason. His main contention was that
all human social life embodies a set of concepts that govern and guide that
life, concepts without which that life would be impossible. These include
our moral concepts. For Kovesi, moral concepts are not external to, but
constitutive of social life in any of its possible forms. But in the course of
his argument he also developed a way of thinking about how concepts
work, which we term ‘conceptual functionalism’, and which we will
elucidate