Rationality Cannot Be Detached from a Tradition

As Alasdair McIntyre points out, "The legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain." The notion of a universal rationality is an aspiration, he argues, rather than an actually existing entity, capable of being realized. Rationalities, he insists, cannot be detached from the traditions which mediate them. They may have pretensions to universality; nevertheless, the historical record discloses that they are actually specific to a tradition."
___
Alister McGrath, A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology, pp. 15-16.