Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)
A Life of Enquiry
One of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century passed away this week. I wrote an essay commemorating him and his work for Compact. He was one of very few philosophers who worked as hard to give an account of his mistakes as of his final positions:
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) had all the signs of a restless mind. Few philosophers changed their views as much as he did. Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, described how difficult it is to move from one intellectual paradigm to another. But the truly difficult task is to reflect on one’s failure in accepting the old paradigm, and to give an account of it.
That’s the lonely, humbling task MacIntyre set for himself in the 1970s…
Read the rest at Compact. If paid subscribers run into a paywall, email me at nathan.pinkoski@gmail.com and I’ll send you a pdf.
For readers who may know little of MacIntyre beyond After Virtue, here are some of my favorite essays or lesser-known books that give a true sense of his intellectual breadth.
Books:
Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and Polemic (1970)
Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)
Dependent Rational Animals (1999)
God, Philosophy, Universities (2009)
Essays:
"Notes from the Moral Wilderness I," New Reasoner 7 (Winter 1958-9), 90–100.
"Notes from the Moral Wilderness II," New Reasoner 8 (Spring 1959), 89–98.
"Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" in Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), 260–279.
"Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science," The Monist 60 (1977), 453–472.
"Is Patriotism a Virtue?" The Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1984).
"The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken," in Carol C. Gould and Robert S. Cohen, eds. Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), 277–290.
"How Can We Learn What Veritatis Splendor Has to Teach?" Thomist 58 (1994), 171–195.
"Natural Law as Subversive: The Case of Aquinas," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (1996), 61–83.
The best biography of him available, which he greatly appreciated, was Émile Perreau-Saussine’s: Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography.