Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (12 January 1929 – 21 May 2025) was a Scottish-American philosopher who contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology.Kelvin Knight, The MacIntyre Reader, Notre Dame Press, 1998, "Interview with Giovanna Borradori," 255–256. MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is one of the most important works of Anglophone moral and political philosophy in the 20th century. He was a senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the Notre Dame de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.. During his lengthy academic career, he also taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Boston University.
Biography Early life and education Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to Eneas and Greta (Chalmers) MacIntyre. He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and had a Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester, where his philosophy teacher was Dorothy Emmet and his fellow student was Herbert McCabe"I first met John Ignatius — not yet Herbert — McCabe in Manchester in 1949 just before he began his Dominican novitiate and just before I began graduate study in philosophy at Manchester University /…/ We were both Dorothy Emmett's students, although neither of us held views anything like hers." in: My email interview with MacIntyre on 29 August 2016, published in Franco Manni, Herbert McCabe: Recollecting a Fragmented Legacy (Eugene OR – Wipf & Stocks, 2020), pp. 37-38 and from the University of Oxford.
Professorship He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester. He taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Essex and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, before moving to the US in around 1969. MacIntyre was something of an intellectual nomad, having taught at many universities in the US. He had held the following positions: Professor of History of Ideas, Brandeis University (1969 or 1970), Dean of the College of Arts and professor of philosophy, Boston University (1972), Henry Luce Professor, Wellesley College (1980), W. Alton Jones Professor, Vanderbilt University (1982), Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame (1985), Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University (1985), Visiting scholar, Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University (1988), McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy, Notre Dame (1989), and Arts & Sciences Professor of Philosophy, Duke University (1995–2000). He had also been a visiting professor at Princeton University and was president of the American Philosophical Association. In 2010, he was awarded the Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1985), the British Academy (1994), the Royal Irish Academy (1999), and the American Philosophical Society (2005).
From 2000, he was the Rev. John A. O'Brien Senior Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy (emeritus since 2010) at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. He was also professor emerit and emeritus at Duke University. In July 2010, he became senior research fellow at London Metropolitan University's Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics. After his retirement from active teaching in 2010, MacIntyre remained the senior distinguished research fellow of the Notre Dame de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, where he retained an office. He continued to make public presentations, including an annual keynote as part of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture's Fall Conference..
Death MacIntyre died on 21 May 2025 at a care facility in South Bend, Indiana, at the age of 96.
Philosophy MacIntyre's approach to moral philosophy interweaves a number of complex strands. Although he largely aims to revive an Aristotelian moral philosophy based on the virtues, he claims a "peculiarly modern understanding" of this task.After Virtue, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 3rd edn, 2007) xii.
This "peculiarly modern understanding" largely concerns MacIntyre's approach to moral disputes. Unlike some analytic philosophers who try to generate moral consensus on the basis of rationality, MacIntyre uses the historical development of ethics to circumvent the modern problem of "incommensurable" moral notions, whose merits cannot be compared in any common framework. Following Hegel and Collingwood, he offers a "philosophical history" (as opposed to analytical and phenomenological approaches) in which he concedes from the beginning that "there are no neutral standards available by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine" the conclusions of moral philosophy.After Virtue, 3, xiii.
In his most famous work, After Virtue, he deprecates the attempt of Enlightenment thinkers to deduce a universal rational morality independent of teleology, whose failure led to the rejection of moral rationality altogether by successors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Charles Stevenson. He emphasizes how this overestimation of reason led to Nietzsche's utter repudiation of the possibility of moral rationality.After Virtue, 257
By contrast, MacIntyre attempts to reclaim more modest forms of moral rationality and argumentation which claim neither finality nor logical certainty, but which can hold up against relativistic or emotivist denials of any moral rationality whatsoever (which MacIntyre regards as the mistake of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Stevenson). He revives the tradition of Aristotelian ethics with its teleological account of the good and of moral actions, as fulfilled in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas. MacIntyre himself recalls some factors that led him to this Thomistic shift."I did not see him [Herbert McCabe] again until the Fall of 1982, when I gave the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford on 'Some Transformations of Justice'. He attended every lecture and each of the seminars that followed each lecture. We also had long discussions in various pubs. I took very strong note of his criticisms, as I acknowledge in the Preface to Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, the book that resulted from the Carlyle Lectures in 1988 /…/ It is of course true that we [Herbert McCabe and I] acknowledged many of the same influences and came to be in substantial agreement on a range of central issues. We were both Dorothy Emmett's students, although neither of us held views anything like hers. We were both influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. But Herbert's preoccupations were those of a theologian, even if an unusually philosophically skilled theologian, whereas mine are those of an Aristotelian philosopher, even if I take Aquinas to be the most important interpreter of Aristotle. And we each drew on Wittgenstein's insights for our own purposes." (My Interview, cit.). "McCabe's remarkable achievement", notes MacIntyre, was "to understand Aquinas both in his own terms and in ours and so to overcome these difficulties". Foreword to Herbert McCabe, God Still Matters, London: Continuum, 2002, vii. American theologian Stanley Hauerwas is even more certain of this philosophical debt. He wrote, "the change in McIntyre's views of Aquinas' significance from After Virtue to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? no doubt is due to many factors, but surely Alasdair's regard for Herbert's reading of Aquinas had some effect".Stanley Hauerwas, "An Unpublished Foreword", New Blackfriars, Vol. 86 (May 2005), p. 292. This Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, he proposes, presents "the best theory so far," both of how things are and how we ought to act.
More generally, according to MacIntyre, moral disputes always take place within and between rival traditions of thought relying on an inherited store of ideas, presuppositions, types of arguments and shared understandings and approaches. Even though there is no definitive way for one tradition in moral philosophy to logically refute another, nevertheless opposing views can dispute each other's internal coherence, resolution of imaginative dilemmas and epistemic crises, and achievement of fruitful results.After Virtue, xii–xiii
After Virtue (1981)
Probably his most widely read work, After Virtue was written when MacIntyre was already in his fifties. Up to then, MacIntyre had been a relatively influential analytic philosopher of a Marxist bent whose moral inquiries had been conducted in a "piecemeal way, focusing first on this problem and then on that, in a mode characteristic of much analytic philosophy."The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) viii However, after reading the works of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos on philosophy of science and epistemology, MacIntyre was inspired to change the entire direction of his thought, tearing up the manuscript he had been working on and deciding to view the problems of modern moral and political philosophy "not from the standpoint of liberal modernity, but instead from the standpoint of ... Aristotelian moral and political practice."The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Vol. 1, viii.
In general terms, the task of After Virtue is to account both for the dysfunction of modern moral discourse in modern society and to rehabilitate the alternative that is teleological rationality in Aristotelian virtue ethics. MacIntyre's philippic articulates a politics of self-defence for local communities who aspire to protect their traditional way of life from corrosive modern influences.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988)
MacIntyre's second major work of his mature period takes up the problem of giving an account of philosophical rationality within the context of his notion of "traditions," which had still remained under-theorized in After Virtue. Specifically, MacIntyre argues that rival and largely incompatible conceptions of justice are the outcome of rival and largely incompatible forms of practical rationality. These competing forms of practical rationality and their attendant ideas of justice are in turn the result of "socially embodied traditions of rational inquiry.""Précis of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?" in MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998) 107. Although MacIntyre's treatment of traditions is quite complex he does give a relatively concise definition: "A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined" in terms of both internal and external debates.Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 12.
Much of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is therefore engaged in the task of not only giving the reader examples of what MacIntyre considers actual rival traditions and the different ways they can split apart, integrate, or defeat one another (e.g. Aristotelian, Augustinianism, Thomist, Humean) but also with substantiating how practical rationality and a conception of justice help constitute those traditions. Specifically, according to him, the differing accounts of justice that are presented by Aristotle and Hume are due to the underlying differences in their conceptual schemes. MacIntyre argues that despite their incommensurability there are various ways in which alien traditions might engage one another rationally – most especially via a form of immanent critique which makes use of empathetic imagination to then put the rival tradition into "epistemic crisis" but also by being able to solve shared or analogous problems and dilemmas from within one's own tradition which remain insoluble from the rival approach.Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 361–362.