After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
Published 1981 · 286 pages · 131,736 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Nonfiction, Philosophy
How hard is After Virtue to read?
After Virtue scores 63 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- Philosophical vocabulary spanning multiple traditions.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Abstraction: 65 out of 100
- High-level moral philosophy.
- Information density: 58 out of 100
- Dense philosophical argument.
- Narrative indirection: 12 out of 100
- Historical narrative serving a philosophical argument.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- The ruined moral landscape as a central metaphor.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Devastating critique of liberal individualism.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The Aristotelian turn is proposed, not fully developed.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Eighteen chapters building a cumulative argument.
How After Virtue is regarded
After Virtue holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.