Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (born 12 January 1929) is a Scottish-American philosopher who has contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology.

MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to Eneas and Greta (Chalmers) MacIntyre.

He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford.

He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester.

He married Ann Peri, with whom he had two daughters, Jean and Toni.

From 1953 to 1963 he was married to Ann Peri, with whom he had two daughters.

From 1963 to 1977 he was married to former teacher and now poet Susan Willans, with whom he had a son and daughter.

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 has been something of an intellectual nomad, having taught at many universities in the US.

He has held the following positions:

He has also been a visiting professor at Princeton University and is a former president of the American Philosophical Association.

Since 1977 he has been married to philosopher Lynn Joy, who is also on the philosophy faculty at Notre Dame.

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.

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.

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.

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 (the mistaken conclusion 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.

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.

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."

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."

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 of 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 the corrosive capitalist free market.

MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) is one of the most important works of Anglophone moral and political philosophy in the 20th century.

He is 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 Center for Ethics and Culture.

During his lengthy academic career, he also taught at Brandeis University, Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and Boston University.

He is 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 is also professor emerit and emeritus at Duke University.

In 2010, he was awarded the Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

In July 2010 he became senior research fellow at London Metropolitan University's Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics.

Since his retirement from active teaching in 2010, he remains the senior distinguished research fellow of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, where he retains an office.

He continues to make public presentations, including an annual keynote as part of the Center for Ethics and Culture's Fall Conference.

He has been married three times.