Analytic & pragmatist · 1929–2025
Alasdair MacIntyre
Scottish-born philosopher who moved from Marxism to Thomism
Modern moral debate is interminable because it uses fragments of older traditions without their context; virtues make sense only within practices, the narrative unity of a life, and a living tradition.
Life and thought
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was born in Glasgow and educated in London, Manchester and Oxford. As a young man he was a Marxist, a member of the Communist Party until 1956 and then of Trotskyist groups. He moved to the United States around 1970, taught at several universities and from the 1980s mainly at Notre Dame, with a spell at Duke, retiring in 2010. In the early 1980s he became a Catholic and a Thomist. He died in May 2025, aged 96.
After Virtue (1981) opens with a parable: imagine that after a catastrophe people go on using the words of a lost natural science without understanding them. Modern moral language, he argues, is like that: we use fragments such as “rights”, “utility” and “duty” torn from the traditions that once gave them sense, so moral debates end in assertion against assertion. Virtues are the qualities needed to achieve the goods internal to practices such as chess, farming or medicine, to give a life the unity of a story, and to sustain a living tradition. The choice, he concluded, is “Nietzsche or Aristotle?”, and he chose Aristotle, and later Aquinas.
Works
Shaped by
384–322 BCEAristotlePlato’s student, Alexander’s tutor, founder of the Lyceum1225–1274Thomas AquinasDominican friar who wove Aristotle into Christian theology1818–1883Karl MarxGerman philosopher, economist and revolutionary in London exileArgued against
1844–1900Friedrich NietzscheAfter Virtue frames modern ethics as a choice: “Nietzsche or Aristotle?”, and argues for Aristotle.Meanwhile, in other traditions
1924–1998Jean-François LyotardFrench philosopher who defined the postmodern condition1925–1995Gilles DeleuzeFrench philosopher of difference, desire and becoming1926–1984Michel FoucaultFrench historian of madness, prisons and sexuality1929–2026Jürgen HabermasLeading second-generation Frankfurt theorist of democracy and communication1930–2004Jacques DerridaAlgerian-born French philosopher who founded deconstruction1935–2003Edward SaidPalestinian-American literary critic at Columbia UniversityOn the record
Alasdair MacIntyre died in 2025.
MacIntyre died on 21 May 2025, aged 96; the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center announced his death on 23 May. He was born in Glasgow on 12 January 1929.