28 Facts About Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre is a Scottish-American philosopher who has contributed to moral and political philosophy as well as history of philosophy and theology.

Alasdair MacIntyre is senior research fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and Permanent Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

Alasdair MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to Eneas and Greta Alasdair MacIntyre.

Alasdair MacIntyre was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford.

Alasdair MacIntyre married Ann Peri with whom he had two daughters, Jean and Toni.

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Alasdair MacIntyre taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Essex and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, before moving to the US in around 1969.

Alasdair MacIntyre has been something of an intellectual nomad, having taught at many universities in the US.

Alasdair MacIntyre has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, and is a former president of the American Philosophical Association.

Alasdair MacIntyre is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy (1994), the Royal Irish Academy (1999), and the American Philosophical Society (2005).

Alasdair MacIntyre is professor emerit and emeritus at Duke University.

Alasdair MacIntyre continues to make public presentations, including an annual keynote as part of the Center for Ethics and Culture's Fall Conference.

Unlike some analytic philosophers who try to generate moral consensus on the basis of rationality, Alasdair MacIntyre uses the historical development of ethics to circumvent the modern problem of "incommensurable" moral notions, whose merits cannot be compared in any common framework.

Alasdair MacIntyre emphasizes how this overestimation of reason led to Nietzsche's utter repudiation of the possibility of moral rationality.

Alasdair MacIntyre revives the tradition of Aristotelian ethics with its teleological account of the good and of moral actions, as fulfilled in the medieval writings of Thomas Aquinas.

Up to then, Alasdair MacIntyre had been a relatively influential analytic philosopher of Marxist bent whose moral inquiries had been conducted in a "piecemeal way, focusing first on this problem and then on that, in a mode characteristic of much analytic philosophy.

Alasdair MacIntyre's philippic articulates a politics of self-defence for local communities who aspire to protect their traditional way of life from the corrosive capitalist free market.

Specifically, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that rival and largely incompatible conceptions of justice are the outcome of rival and largely incompatible forms of practical rationality.

Tradition-bound account of rational inquiry Alasdair MacIntyre articulates and deploys throughout these lectures suggests reforms, which he explores in chapter X, both for the lecture as a genre and for the university as an institution.

Alasdair MacIntyre writes the following of this shift in the preface to the book: "Although there is indeed good reason to repudiate important elements in Aristotle's biology, I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible.

Alasdair MacIntyre is a key figure in the recent surge of interest in virtue ethics, which identifies the central question of morality as having to do with the habits and knowledge concerning how to live a good life.

Alasdair MacIntyre's approach seeks to demonstrate that good judgment emanates from good character.

Alasdair MacIntyre emphasises the importance of moral goods defined in respect to a community engaged in a 'practice'—which he calls 'internal goods' or 'goods of excellence'—rather than focusing on practice-independent obligation of a moral agent or the consequences of a particular act (utilitarianism).

Alasdair MacIntyre intends the idea of virtue to supplement, rather than replace, moral rules.

Alasdair MacIntyre considers his work to be outside "virtue ethics" due to his affirmation of virtues as embedded in specific, historically grounded, social practices.

Politically, Alasdair MacIntyre's ethics informs a defence of the Aristotelian 'goods of excellence' internal to practices against the modern pursuit of 'external goods', such as money, power, and status, that are characteristic of rule-based, utilitarian, Weberian modern institutions.

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Alasdair MacIntyre has been described as a 'revolutionary Aristotelian' because of his attempt to combine historical insights from his Marxist past with those of Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle after MacIntyre's conversion to Catholicism.

Alasdair MacIntyre says about Marxists that "as they move towards power they always tend to become Weberians.

Alasdair MacIntyre converted to Catholicism in the early 1980s, and now does his work against the background of what he calls an "Augustinian Thomist approach to moral philosophy.