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.

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born in 1929 at Glasgow, the son of a Scottish physician of Irish background. He took his bachelor's at Queen Mary College, London, and his master's at Manchester, and after early lectureships at Manchester, Leeds, Oxford, and Essex emigrated to the United States in 1969. He held a long succession of American chairs — at Brandeis, Boston University, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, and Duke — and from 2000 the Senior Research Fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies at Notre Dame.

His major works include Marxism: An Interpretation (1953, much revised as Marxism and Christianity, 1968), the New Reasoner essays of his early Marxist period, A Short History of Ethics (1966), the foundational After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), Dependent Rational Animals (1999), and the late Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). His political and religious trajectory took him from Anglican Christianity through Marxism and the Moral Sciences group at Cambridge to Roman Catholicism in 1983.

MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral discourse as a wreckage of fragments from a discarded Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition and argued for the recovery of practices, narratives, traditions, and the virtues as the framework within which any rational moral inquiry must take place. After Virtue made him one of the most read moral philosophers of the late twentieth century and a principal voice in the revival of virtue ethics. He died in May 2025 at the age of ninety-six.