MacIntyre, Alasdair Chalmers

(1929-)

   A British Roman-Catholic moral philosopher working in America, MacIntyre has exercised a profound influence on many Christian philosophers and theologians. In particular, he has defended virtue ethics and a return to Aristotelianism, arguing that much current ethics is so rootless as to be useless and nonsensical. In 1955, during his Marxist phase, MacIntyre co-edited with Antony Flew a collection of essays in philosophy of religion, but since then his work has been in moral and political philosophy, or on the history of these. MacIntyre gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1988.

   See Aristotelianism; ethics; ethics, virtue

   Further reading: Flew and MacIntyre 1955; Horton and Mendus 1994; Knight 1998; MacIntyre 1959, 1985, 1988 and 1990; Murphy, Mark C. 2003; Murphy, Kallenberg and Nation 1997