Alasdair MacIntyre 1929 – 2025

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a Scottish-American moral and political philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. His After Virtue, published in 1981, argued that modern moral discourse is the surviving fragment of a coherence it has lost, and that the recovery of intelligible ethical life requires a recovery of tradition, narrative, and practice. Whose Justice, Which Rationality, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals extended this argument into a defense of a broadly Aristotelian and Thomistic understanding of human flourishing. He taught at Notre Dame, Boston University, and many other universities.