Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born to John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre in Glasgow, Scotland, on January 12, 1929. He earned a BA in classics from Queen Mary College (University of London) in 1949 and began graduate work in philosophy at Manchester University the same year. He received an MA in 1951 and spent the next six years at Manchester as lecturer in philosophy of religion. From 1957 to 1959 he was lecturer in philosophy at Leeds University. He then went to Oxford for further study of philosophy, receiving an Oxonian MA in 1961. This is his highest academic degree.
During the 1960s MacIntyre made brief stands in England and abroad. He was research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1961–62, spent a year at Princeton as senior fellow with the Council of the Humanities in 1962–63, and then returned to Oxford to serve three years as fellow of University College. From 1966 to 1970, he was professor of sociology at the University of Essex, with a side trip to University of Copenhagen as visiting lecturer in 1969. In 1970 he immigrated to the United States, to become Richard Koret Professor of History of Ideas at Brandeis University.
MacIntyre’s very substantial list of publications began to proliferate even before he left Essex University. While still at Manchester, he published Marxism: An Interpretation (1953) and coedited New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955) with Anthony Flew. Next came The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis (1958) and Difficulties in Christian Belief (1959). His landmark A Short History of Ethics appeared in 1966, followed by Secularization and Moral Change in 1967. The Religious Significance of Atheism came out in 1969, and then Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic in 1970.
As these titles indicate, MacIntyre’s scholarship during this early period was preoccupied with two interconnected themes. One was Marxism as a theory of social action. During his first few years at Manchester, in fact, he had been an active member of the Communist Party. Although he subsequently rejected Marxism as a philosophic theory, he continued to respect socialist ideology as a system of beliefs that could impart purpose to the lives of ordinary people. The other theme dominating his research was the role of Christianity and the Christian tradition in providing a social order in which a human life could be lived coherently. MacIntyre emerged from this period neither Marxist nor Christian, but was already working with concepts that would underlie his later thinking about institutions and traditions.
MacIntyre’s next major publication was Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (1971), which came out while he was still at Brandeis. In 1972, he left Brandeis for Boston University (BU), assuming the university professorship of philosophy and political science. He was soon made dean of the College of Liberal Arts by John Silber, who had become president of BU just the previous year. The collaboration with Silber went badly, and MacIntyre retreated to the Philosophy Department proper in 1973. He became chair of that department in 1976, a position he continued to occupy through 1979. In 1980, he moved a few miles north to Wellesley College, where he became the Henry B. Luce, Jr., Professor of Language, Mind and Culture. I had been vetted for that position, but Wellesley wisely chose McIntyre instead.
During his stay at BU, Alasdair had married Lynn Joy, then a graduate student at Harvard in history of science. When Lynn received her PhD in 1982, he left Wellesley and the two of them took positions at Vanderbilt University. Alasdair thereby became the W. Alton Jones Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, while Lynn switched to philosophy from history of science to become assistant professor in the same department. They stayed at Vanderbilt for six years, until 1988.
In the meanwhile, Alasdair had been making overtures to Notre Dame. He had visited the Philosophy Department three times as Perspective lecturer in the 1970s, and each time had been very well received. Aware of his interest, the department invited him for another lecture in February 1986 and did everything in its power to make him feel welcome. After a year’s delay, the university was ready to make him an offer. In February 1988, Provost Timothy O’Meara offered Alasdair the McMahon-Hank Professorship of Philosophy, which he readily accepted. Lynn Joy came with him to ND as associate professor of philosophy with tenure. They stayed for six years, until the spring of 1995. During this time, Alasdair published Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (UNDP, 1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, Tradition (UNDP, 1990), while Lynn published Gassendi the Atomist, Advocate of History in an Age of Science.
Alasdair’s departure to Duke University in 1995 was a matter of consternation for ND administrators. Knowing that he had converted to Catholicism early in the 1980s, A&L Dean Harold Attridge sent Alasdair a letter dated October 4, 1994, stressing the importance of his continued presence for ND’s development into “a major Catholic University.” He also offered Alasdair a contract exceeding Duke’s offer in every respect involving money, as well as season tickets to home football games on the “30 yard line or better.” His counteroffer to Lynn was even more attractive. If she stayed, she would be promoted to full professor, draw a salary almost $4,000 higher than Duke had offered, receive an annual “research fund” of $5,000, and be granted a full year leave of absence every four years. But to no avail. Alasdair was approaching an age when retirement seemed natural, while Lynn, already in her late thirties, was eager to get on with her own career. Thanking Dean Attridge for his generous offer, Lynn went to Duke as professor in the Philosophy Department and Alasdair accompanied her as arts and sciences professor of philosophy.
The coming of Joy and MacIntyre was much heralded by the Duke department. In the January 27, 1995, issue of The Chronicle, Duke’s daily student newspaper, Alasdair reported that he came to Duke “because of the possibilities offered by the department,” and Lynn explained her arrival by saying that her work could “complement the work of others” at that university. The article ended by quoting Owen Flanagan, then chair of the Duke department, as saying that he believed “that MacIntyre and Joy [were] prepared to stay at Duke . . . through retirement.” As it turned out, Flanagan was right in the case of MacIntyre, who left Duke as arts and sciences professor emeritus in the year 2000. But after five years of “complementing the work of others,” Joy was ready to return to active duty at ND. By the end of the 1990s, after all, Duke was a dozen or so notches below ND in the Gourmet rankings. And that seemed unlikely to change within the next decade.
Lynn Joy returned in 2000 as professor of philosophy and has remained at ND up to the present. Perhaps because of his emeritus status at Duke, Alasdair thought better of returning to the Philosophy Department itself. Instead he became senior research professor with ND’s Center for Ethics and Culture. Although his salary was modest by his own request, he was assigned a substantial discretionary fund and taught only one or two undergraduate courses a year. After returning to ND, he published Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922 in 2006, and God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition in 2009, both with Rowman & Littlefield in Lanham, Maryland (not a university press). In 2005, after the death of Phil Quinn, Alasdair’s position in the Center for Ethics and Culture was upgraded to the O’Brien Senior Research Professor of Philosophy. He retired from that position in 2010, the year Alvin Plantinga vacated his own O’Brien Chair.
Alasdair’s second stay at ND, from 2000–2010, was the longest in one place of his entire career. Desire to migrate prevailed again in 2010, when he joined the faculty of newly founded (and soon beleaguered) London Metropolitan University. Undaunted by the commuting this entails, he and Lynn maintained their primary residence in a suburb a few miles from ND. They also bought an apartment in Chicago.
Unlike Plantinga, MacIntyre did not attract other prominent scholars in his discipline to the university. And relatively few graduate students came to ND to study with him specifically. But as already suggested, he probably attracted more favorable attention to the university than any other single member of the Philosophy Department. He was president of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in 1984. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 1985, and gave the Gifford Lecture at the University of Edinburgh in 1988. He has received honorary degrees from Swarthmore College (1983), Queen’s University of Belfast (1988), University of Essex (1990), Williams College (1993), New School of Social Research (1996), Marquette University (2000), St. Patrick’s University, Maynooth (2002), and National University of Ireland (2009).
In addition to these and other professional honors, MacIntyre to date has authored or edited eighteen books (several previously mentioned ) and published over 150 professional articles. To borrow a line from his friend and collaborator, theologian Stanley Hauerwas, few would “dispute that Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most important philosophers of our time.”
EDITORIAL STATEMENT: This article is excerpted from Adventures in Philosophy at Notre Dame (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read our excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
