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Alasdair MacIntyre is a philosopher specializing in Ethics. He is currently a Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at The University of Notre Dame (in Indiana, USA). His core interests include ethics, practical reason, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.
He is a key figure in the modern resurgence of interest in virtue ethics, arguing that ancient and medieval approaches to moral thought have been more successful than modern approaches, an idea he placed arrestingly to work in his "disquieting suggestion" in After Virtue. He traces a line of decay from the abandonment of Aristotelianism by Descartes and his followers, through the Enlightenment to the philosophy of emotivism, which he characterises as the final, and fully incoherent, end of this train of development. Because of his call for restoring a moral center by endorsing coherent systems of ethical values, he is often depicted as a conservative thinker. His focus, however, is on the fact that meaningful moral progress is possible only within coherent traditions of ethical values. Otherwise, the different ideas of rationality underlying radically different conceptions of ethics do not allow for sharing values and, therefore, for being able to reach (moral) consensus.
Selected Bibliography
- Marxism: An Interpretation, 1953;
- A Short History of Ethics, 1966;
- Marxism and Christianity, 1968;
- Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy, 1971;
- After Virtue, 1981, 2nd ed. 1984;
- Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1988;
- Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 1990;
- Dependent Rational Animals, 1999.
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