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Irish Times
6 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
The Gaelic philosopher who wrote ‘one of the most influential books of our time'
There are formative cultural experiences in all our lives. I'll never forget hearing The Smiths for the first time, watching The Breakfast Club, and reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Alasdair who, I hear you say? For fans of the Scottish philosopher, who died last month aged 96, his barnstorming book on the future of western thought felt like an intellectual coming-of-age. 'We have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality,' he wrote. READ MORE It is not just that we are trapped in seemingly irreconcilable arguments about what's right and wrong. It's that we have lost touch with a shared language that can make reconciliation possible. So MacIntyre proclaimed in his book, first published in 1981, although that short precis of After Virtue doesn't nearly do it justice. The British writer Kenan Malik describes After Virtue as a 'brilliant, bleak, frustrating and above all provocative' work, while Irish philosopher Joseph Dunne calls it 'a coruscating critique of the ills of modernity'. MacIntyre was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent – 'who ensured that he learned Irish', Dunne points out. An 'active Trotskyite' for many years and a member of the Community Party in the UK, MacIntyre progressively moved away from Marx towards Aristotle and, in later life, converted to Catholicism. One constant throughout was a pride in his Gaelic roots. Dunne, who taught philosophy at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University and closely engaged with MacIntyre's work, told The Irish Times that, 'in an earlier atheist phase', MacIntyre 'had identified himself as a 'Catholic atheist' on the grounds that 'only Catholics worshipped a God worth denying'.' But what made After Virtue so special? The book begins with an arresting image. Picture the world of science experiencing a 'catastrophe' whereby 'laboratories are burnt down' and no one can provide a convincing proof that two plus two does not equal five. Something similar has happened to moral philosophy, MacIntyre argued. As religious certainties faded away, and as we abandoned traditional belief systems, we have been left with purely emotional judgments on morality. In short, we cry 'hurrah' and 'boo' at one another without any common ground. For MacIntyre the rot set in with the Enlightenment, and its promise of creating a moral framework divorced from history and community. The Enlightenment gave us two new ways of assessing ethical matters: human rights theory and utilitarianism. The former has strengthened recognition of individual freedom but it runs into trouble when competing rights clash. Utilitarianism advocates doing whatever maximises benefit and minimises harm. Reimagined as 'effective altruism', it is the favourite ethic of tech bros who claim to be making the world a better place while acting like jerks. MacIntyre called for a return to an earlier way of thinking known as virtue theory. This emphasises the need to cultivate characteristics like honesty, humility and compassion. In a unique and exhilarating twist, After Virtue wrapped this argument up in a wider critique of capitalism, the creeping managerialism of society and the coarsening of political language. Central to Alasdair MacIntyre's thinking is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose' For someone who is hardly a household name, MacIntyre had an outsize influence on a generation of political scientists. In Malik's book The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, there are more references to MacIntyre than to George Berkeley, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Voltaire put together. But he has his critics too. Liberal commentator and author Mark Lilla says After Virtue 'turned out to be one of the most influential books of our time' – but not in a good way. 'By blurring the lines between intellectual history and philosophical argument, MacIntyre ... developed a compelling just-so story about how our dark world came to be,' Lilla writes in The Shipwrecked Mind. For liberals like Lilla, we should double down on Enlightenment values, not back away from them. When faced with monsters trampling over international human rights law, we need a stronger response than appealing to virtues. We need a system for managing conflict, along with clear rules and punishments. MacIntyre opens After Virtue with an epitaph to deceased ancestors: 'gus am bris an la', Scots Gaelic for 'until the day breaks'. The book also 'ends with a kind of prayer', Lilla observes. But prayer won't stop Vladimir Putin or Binyamin Netanyahu raining missiles down on civilians. Ultimately, MacIntyre left room for debate over how we should rehabilitate our moral thinking. After Virtue does not close off the possibility of restoring virtue theory to its rightful place in our collective reasoning, while taking the best of what both human rights theory and utilitarianism have to offer. Central to MacIntyre's thinking, however, is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose'. The Enlightenment sidelined inquiry into purpose; searching for 'the meaning of life' itself became a figure of fun. But MacIntyre believed it was essential for humans to have a meaningful story about where they came from and where they're going. He insisted, as Dunne puts it, on 'the narrative structure of a human life'. 'I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?',' MacIntyre wrote, 'if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'.' We have become accustomed to self-help books spoon-feeding us 'lessons for life'. But a proper work of philosophy inspires us to ask better questions.
ABC News
06-06-2025
- ABC News
'A revolutionary Aristotelian': Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre (1929 – 2025) - ABC Religion & Ethics
For more than seven decades, Alasdair MacIntyre was one of the world's most prolific and provocative philosophers. His best known work is After Virtue (1981), which was lauded by Newsweek as 'a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world'. At a time when the bare alternatives were Kantian duty-based ethics and utilitarian consequentialist ethics, After Virtue revolutionised the field of moral philosophy by reintroducing virtue ethics as a viable alternative, and by calling into question — much like Elizabeth Anscombe before him — the practice of modern moral philosophy as an attempt to make sense of the shards left over from the shattered pre-modern synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem. MacIntyre's sequels Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and his Gifford Lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990) defended, extended and modified the claims of After Virtue . In Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999), MacIntyre explored the similarities and differences between humans and non-human animals, criticising Enlightenment conceptions of the human being as insufficiently attentive to human vulnerability and interdependence. His book God, Philosophy, Universities (2009) was based on a popular undergraduate course offered during his last years of teaching, and his final book returned to the themes that had preoccupied him since 1981, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). It is remarkable to consider that MacIntyre's first academic publication, 'Analogy in Metaphysics' (1951), was written before he turned 22 years old, and more than seventy years later, at the age of 93, his 2022 lecture 'The Apparent Oddity of the Universe: How to Account for It?' attracted enormous attention. MacIntyre's conversions Born in Glasgow in 1929, Alasdair MacIntyre's early imagination was fuelled by Gaelic stories of fishermen and farmers facing challenges set in a communal life. After studying classics and earning degrees from Oxford, Manchester and the University of London, MacIntyre began teaching philosophy in 1951 — a job he liked, he told his graduate students, because it was 'inside work with no heavy lifting'. MacIntyre was proud never to have earned a PhD: 'I won't go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD', he said, 'but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.' However, his prolific research won him ten honorary doctorates and appointments as Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He held academic positions at Oxford, Yale, Manchester, Leeds, Essex, University of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Brandeis, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt, London Metropolitan University, Duke and three appointments at Princeton. But he found a lasting home at the University of Notre Dame. These frequent changes in location mirror MacIntyre's restless mind. He joined and then left the Communist party, but never abandoned a Marxist critique of a capitalist social and economic order. He attended lectures by A.J. Ayer, but reading Wittgenstein convinced MacIntyre of the weakness of Ayer's logical positivism. He found congenial, at different times, Freudianism and a non-metaphysical Aristotelianism, but later became a biologically grounded Aristotelian. MacIntyre's synthetic approach was informed by seminal figures in analytic philosophy, such as Gottlob Frege and Donald Davidson, as well as by key authors in continental philosophy, like Edith Stein and Hans Gadamer. MacIntyre's work reflected a deep familiarity with sociology, psychology, biology, psychoanalysis (especially Jacques Lacan) and literature (especially Jane Austen). MacIntyre's multiple conversions were also religious. In the 1940s, he considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. In the 1950s, he became an Anglican. In the 1960s, he became an atheist — but he said he was 'a Roman Catholic atheist. Only the Catholics worshiped a God worth denying.' That too would change. As he put it: 'I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian.' After previously rejecting them, he reconsidered arguments for God's existence. In 1983, he became a Roman Catholic in faith and a Thomist in philosophy, a 'result of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its authenticity'. What impressed him, in part, was: that Aquinas — to an extent not matched by either Plato or [A.J.] Ayer — does not commit himself to accepting any particular answer to whatever question it is that he is asking, until he has catalogued all the reasonable objections to that answer that he can identify and has found what he takes to be sufficient reason for rejecting each of them. Following his example seems an excellent way of ensuring that I become adequately suspicious of any philosophical theses which I am tempted to accept. No longer Karl Barth, MacIntyre's favourite twentieth-century theologian became Joseph Ratzinger. Like other Catholic converts who were professors of philosophy — such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Nicholas Rescher and Sir Michael Dummett — MacIntyre saw no contradiction between his faith and his philosophy. Indeed, he viewed them as mutually enriching. Through all these conversions, however, MacIntyre emphasised that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgements. As he wrote in A Short History of Ethics (1966): [I]t is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation. Indeed, it is the telling of stories that makes us who we are: [M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' MacIntyre's acid wit MacIntyre often played the part of provocateur. Though gentler with undergraduates, in his graduate classes as well as in his scholarly writings Alasdair exhibited an acerbic wit. He described the work of one philosopher as 'the philosophical equivalent of Vogue '. In a review of Hans Küng's book Does God Exist? , MacIntyre remarked: [R]eading this book was not entirely without theological significance for me. Whenever in future I try to imagine what Purgatory will be like, the thought of having to reread Dr Küng's book is certain to recur. On another occasion, he said that 'modern Roman Catholic theologians have been to an alarming degree narcissistic', giving the 'impression of being only mildly interested in either God or the world; what they are passionately interested in are other Roman Catholic theologians.' As an article in The Nation noted: 'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, 'I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post'.' Even the philosopher who had perhaps the greatest influence on him did not escape his caustic barbs: 'Aristotle was not a nice or a good man: the words 'supercilious prig' spring to mind very often in reading the Ethics .' In the classroom, MacIntyre followed the example of Socrates, who demonstrated to those in his company the depths of what they did not know. My first graduate class with him was on twentieth-century ethics. I read all the books for the fall semester the summer before, so I thought I was ready to impress. On the first day of class, he began in stern British schoolmaster style, 'I'm Alasdair MacIntyre, but if you don't already know that, you probably shouldn't be in this class.' Unlike other professors, he did not address us as 'Christopher' or 'Rebecca', but as 'Mr Kaczor' and 'Ms DeYoung'. The only exception was 'Master Resnick', who had gained his MA already. MacIntyre announced that in order to earn an A on a paper, we would have to write an essay of the calibre that he would put his own name on it. An A minus meant he would almost put his name on it. My first paper came back with a grade that I had never before received. Indeed, a grade I had never before seen : B minus minus . A philosophical version of a drill sergeant, MacIntyre left us in much better shape than when we began. As Lee Marsh put it, 'When I met Alasdair MacIntyre, I realized how much I did not know and why I should know it.' We learned that there was such a thing as a stupid question. One graduate student asked, 'What are the Thirty-Nine Articles?' MacIntyre replied, 'Do you happen to know where the library is? It's not too late to learn.' We were continually kept off balance, often not knowing where the jokes ended and the serious warnings began. One day, Alasdair announced, 'I happen to be one who believes torture is not always wrong — something you may want to remember.' He warned us, 'Never call me at home unless you want to no longer be a student in the graduate program.' This admonition was entirely unnecessary because most of us were afraid to speak with him, even during class time. Graduate students brave enough to visit his office, dark as a cave and lit by a solitary lamp, found it adorned with a Celtic cross and a photo of the Jewish-born philosopher Edith Stein, who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. One day, having finally earned better paper grades in his '20th Century Ethics' course, as well as in his course on 'Practical Rationality', I ventured into his office to ask for his coveted letter of recommendation. It took courage to request one. He told one graduate student, 'I can certainly write you a letter, but it is the kind of letter that keeps you from getting a job.' Fortunately, his letter of recommendation for me did not keep me from getting my first job, nor my current job. Not only did he help us on the job market, MacIntyre's virtues gave his students an example to emulate. When doing a directed readings class with one undergraduate, MacIntyre remarked that there was a recent article in French very much relevant for their discussion. Unfortunately, the student couldn't read French. So the next time they met together, MacIntyre provided the student with a translation he had made of the article. Alasdair had a great love for American football, especially Notre Dame football. Yet he often gave graduate students his football tickets — and this was during the Lou Holtz-era when the Fighting Irish were perennial national championship contenders. His students saw him debating with Sir Bernard Williams about rival interpretations of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex — a battle of titans who learned their Greek as youths. And we saw him at Mass in Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, standing off at a distance from the altar and honouring the Mother of God. MacIntyre's ladder MacIntyre often joked that his most significant achievement was breaking up the Beatles. Conventional wisdom has it that Yoko Ono played a key role in the end of the band. In 1966, MacIntyre lived in the same apartment complex as Yoko. One day, she came to MacIntyre's apartment and asked to borrow a ladder that she needed for her upcoming art show. It was at this art exhibit that John Lennon met Yoko. Lennon himself recounts: There was another piece that really decided me for-or-against the artist: a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says 'yes'. So it was positive. I felt relieved. It's a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and … it said 'yes' … I was very impressed and John Dunbar introduced us. Lennon mentions the ladder MacIntyre gave to Yoko three times. Without the ladder, would Lennon have been so impressed with the art exhibit? Without being so impressed, would he have asked to meet Yoko? If Lennon had not met Yoko, would the Beatles have broken up? I don't know. What I do know is this. I have never met, nor do I ever expect to meet again, a philosopher as fascinating as the author of After Virtue . If we are waiting for Godot, he may well arrive before another — doubtless very different — Alasdair MacIntyre. Christopher Kaczor Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, and an Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life at the Word on Fire Institute. He was appointed a Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a visiting fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, and William E. Simon Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. An earlier version of this article appeared on Word on Fire.
Wall Street Journal
06-06-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Humanity According to Alasdair MacIntrye
One of the world's greatest Catholic philosophers died May 21. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was 96. Normally classified as a philosopher of ethics, MacIntyre was a fierce critic of modern ethical theory. His writings drew deeply from a wide array of fields, including theology, social science, psychology, history and literature, but he never pursued a doctorate. Born in Glasgow, he received master's degrees from Manchester and Oxford, later telling a student: 'I won't go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a Ph.D., but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.'
New York Times
02-06-2025
- General
- New York Times
Alasdair MacIntyre, Philosopher Who Saw a ‘New Dark Ages,' Dies at 96
Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who metamorphosed from a London Marxist into a Midwestern American Catholic during a decades-long quest to prove there was an objective foundation to moral virtue — a lonely project that struck many of his academic peers as anachronistic yet drew a large, varied and growing crowd of admirers — died on May 21. He was 96. His death was announced by the University of Notre Dame, where Mr. MacIntyre was a professor emeritus of philosophy. The announcement did not say where he died. Moral beliefs are widely considered matters of private conscience — up for debate, of course, but not resolvable in any sort of final consensus. That is why, for example, people generally think teachers should guide students toward self-realization, rather than proselytize their own beliefs. The same neutrality is expected of lawyers, therapists, government officials and others. Mr. MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe. In his best-known book, 'After Virtue' (1981), he argued that thousands of years ago, the earliest Western philosophers and the Homeric myths generated 'the tradition of the virtues,' which was treated as objective truth. Value neutrality, to Mr. MacIntyre, was the goal of 'barbarians' and a sign of 'the new dark ages which are already upon us.' Such language might make Mr. MacIntyre seem like a wistful reactionary. In fact, his worldview was far less predictable. He never entirely disavowed his youthful Marxism, applauding Marx's critique of the individualistic and acquisitive spirit of capitalism. He maintained a certain sort of modesty from his days as a self-appointed champion of the working class — he never earned a Ph.D. and disliked being called 'professor' — and he continued showing the dialectical passion of a Trotskyist, occasionally launching into what one colleague called 'MacIntyrades.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Spectator
27-05-2025
- Politics
- Spectator
What Alasdair MacIntyre got right
Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last week, was one of the most influential thinkers of the past 50 years. It is hard to think of any other philosopher writing in the late 20th-century who has had such an impact. He might be less famous than Foucault or Derrida, but it is his conservative brand of postmodernism that launched a fairly coherent intellectual movement. For a few decades its adherents were mostly academics; now it has become politically influential too. Like those aforementioned Frenchmen, he was a powerful critic of the rational Enlightenment. And like them, his thought was strongly shaped by Marxism, and its critique of liberal political assumptions. But unlike them he decided that it was not enough to be suspicious of all ideologies. The task was to reconstruct meaning, amid the chaos and nihilism of modern thought. This bold proposal is set out in his book of 1981, After Virtue.
