Dependent rational animals Book

This is a wonderful, lucid, and for me, reorienting work in philosophical anthropology and ethics. MacIntyre weaves together the Aristotelian/Thomistic trajectory of his earlier work with recent work in animal intelligence, on the one hand, and with an explication of the concept of dependency as a constitutive feature of human identity and agency, on the other.
MacIntyre rather convincingly demonstrates that a continuum of intelligence is at work in nature, that other animals exhibit what must be considered evidence of rationality and intelligence of a limited sort.
In addition, his discussion of practical reason is really fruitful. MacIntyre is a fantastic writer, and the argument that practical reason requires virtues of dependency and has an irreducibly social character I find compelling. My own preference is a version of this argument put forward through Mead and Dewey, but it is surprising how this Thomistic thinker's work here puts him in deep sympathy with Classical American Pragmatism. He extends the analysis of practical reason, putting identity in a tight relationship with social learning processes with respect to reasoning. This is a welcome extension of his model of agency on offer in his earlier work After Virtue.
Most importantly, his analysis of dependency in our lives, necessarily as infants and as senior citizens, and contingently on our life's path, has extended my sympathies ( and I would argue 'ought' extend any reader's sympathies ) toward my fellow human beings greatly. Something philosophy books all too rarely achieve.