The idea of an educated public in the Macintyre’s critique of the enlightenment

The article analyzes MacIntyre’s notion of “educated public” which is presented in his lecture The Idea of an Educated Public and in the concluding chapters of the Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, where this idea is conceptualized in the context of the question about the place of universities in contemporary society. While the clames which MacIntyre gave in this texts are intepretated like questions about the “conditions of possibility” for the realization of an educational project which belongs to liberal and Enlightenment tradition, we are critically interpreting his notion of “independent thinking” and the issue of the relationship between “independent thinking” and “standards of rational justification”. The thesis form which we started in this paper is that MacIntyre’s reaffirmation of the idea of an educated public does not only represent his answer to the question about the aims of education but also an invitation to the humanities to be more actively involved in the discussion of the issues which are important to larger society.