Alasdair MacIntyre

MacIntyre was born in Glasgow to two doctors and grew up in London, steeped at once in Gaelic tradition and Marxist circles. He read classics at Queen Mary College, London, and philosophy at Manchester and Oxford, published Marxism: An Interpretation at twenty-three, was active in the British New Left in the 1950s, joined and left the Communist party, joined a Trotskyist group, and was meanwhile an Anglican. He taught at Manchester, Leeds, Essex and Oxford.

In 1970 he moved to the United States, teaching at Brandeis, Boston University, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame and Duke, and remained in America for the rest of his life. His early Short History of Ethics and The Unconscious already showed the habit of treating philosophical problems historically. He said he underwent an intellectual 'turn' in the 1970s, abandoned the framework of everything he had written, and spent ten years on After Virtue.

After Virtue (1981) opens with a thought experiment: imagine a catastrophe destroying the natural sciences, leaving people with scattered terms and formulae they still use without knowing their meaning. Our moral language is in that state. The Enlightenment tried to give morality a rational foundation, and Hume, Kant and Bentham all failed, because they had discarded the Aristotelian framework: human beings have a telos, and the virtues are the qualities needed to reach it. The result of failure is emotivism, moral judgement as the expression of preference, which Nietzsche saw through. The choice is Nietzsche or Aristotle. His reconstruction centres on 'practices': the virtues are the qualities that enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, embedded in the narrative unity of a life and the tradition of a community.

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) argued that there is no standard of reason above traditions, but that traditions can be compared through 'epistemological crises'. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) compared the encyclopaedist, the genealogist and the Thomist. Dependent Rational Animals (1999) filled a gap he acknowledged: humans are vulnerable animals dependent on others, and the virtues of dependence matter as much as those of independence. Professor at Notre Dame in his last decades, he opposed liberalism and conservatism alike, calling the modern state not a community but 'a set of bargaining interests', with real politics found in local communities of practice. He died in 2025 at ninety-six.