For further information about the prolific MacIntyre, see the Wikipedia entry "Alasdair MacIntyre":
Now, for David Brooks in his recent NYT column dated May 29, 2025, the abstractions that Vance does not like include "that America stands for a set of universal principles: the principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with inalienable rights, that democracy is the form of government that best recognizes human dignity and best honors beings who are made in the image of God."
Whew! In David Brooks' view, Trumpism is bad! No doubt most liberals and progressives would agree with David Brooks that Trumpism is bad.
Now, David Brooks goes on to say that following: "The Bible is built on abstractions: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The Sermon on the Mount contains a bunch of abstractions: blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the merciful. Believe it or not, down through the centuries, billions of people have dedicated their lives to these abstractions."
Now, David Brooks here aligns the Judeo-Christian scripture with certain abstractions.
Even so, the 1776 Declaration of Independence is unquestionably the byproduct of the American Enlightenment and of the Age of Reason in our Western cultural history.
Now, in the classicist Eric A. Havelock's landmark 1963 book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Havelock aligns the abstractions of the Western philosophic tradition of thought from the time of Plato and Aristotle onward with abstractions. Havelock contrasts philosophic abstractions with the more concrete imagistic thinking of the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey - the byproducts of oral singers of tales and thus of what the American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) refers to as primary oral culture and primary oral thought and expression.
Ong's most succinct discussion of primary oral thought and expression can be found in his accessible 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, pp. 36-68).
I have discussed Ong's account of orally based thought and expression extensively in my article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4 (2012): pp. 255-272.
In any event, Ong never tired of touting Havelock's 1963 book Preface to Plato. Ong's insightful review of Havelock's 1963 book is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 309-312).
Ong's account of the Age of Reason in our Western cultural history is contained in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason in Ramus and subsequently in the Age of Reason (Harvard University Press) - Ong's pioneering study of the emergence of print culture in our Western cultural history after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in Europe on the mid-1450s.
I have discussed Ong's media-ecology thought in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020; viewed 3,073 times as of May 30, 2025):
Even though I see Ong's media-ecology thought as philosophical thought in my OEN article dated September 20, 2020, I am sorry to say that Ong's media-ecology thought is not well known in departments of philosophy today.
In any event, Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr whose works in logic (also known as dialectic) were extremely popular for a time. Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue is a history of the formal study of logic from Aristotle to Ramus and beyond.
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