As someone who came to philosophy via the study of the Past (through history and archaeology both), reading “After Virtue” was a wonderful experience.

I had become somewhat jaded with the fact that much modern English-language philosophy I encountered seemed to be disconnected from how we are and how we were, how we live and how we have lived — and instead seemed to be busy constructing frameworks in the sky.

And so I read a philosopher, from within the same intellectual mileu, for whom the Past was not a curiosity but rather one of the most critical components in answering questions of the human condition. And this was a liberation. It made me understand that there is another way to do Philosophy. That there is moral purpose in studying yesterday.

Alas — as Tom Angier wrote in “After Virtue at 40” — despite the book’s fame, it seems like moral philosophy mostly goes on as if it were never written.

Gus am bris an là.

ON ALASDAIR MACINTYRE: Alasdair was my dissertation advisor at Boston University 1973 – 1974. My dissertation was on the role of ideology in economic theory, very much influenced by Marx’s views, but focusing on rather technical issues inspired by the “Cambridge controversy” over the nature of capital. He was an absolutely ideal advisor for that topic, as I imagine he would have been for any topic given his extraordinary breadth of knowledge. In my case, he even knew Piero Sraffa and Joan Robinson personally, the economists at the center of the controversy, plus he was then, as he remained, an authority on ideology in both its philosophical and historical dimensions. He was also one of the few senior philosophers in America at the time who actually knew a great deal about Marx. In our last conversation, he told me that he remained convinced of Marx’s critique of capitalism as an economic system.

To me, Alasdair’s importance was not unlike Stanley Cavell’s, insofar as his work––however one assessed its particular claims–gave permission to be interested in questions, authors, even other fields that more narrow-minded analytical philosophy otherwise dismissed. Alasdair was completely intolerant of the philosophical sectarianisms of the time, such as the dismissal of Hegel and other Continental figures. He once said to me that such sectarianisms were excuses for laziness, i.e. for not wanting to spend the energy to understand other traditions/thinkers. I think of this whenever I hear anyone express uninformed disdain for another’s philosophical perspective. He expected his students to be interested in everything; he famously deplored the pressure on young philosophers to specialize too early in their work. He recommended that no one be permitted to publish anything before the age of 35.

Alasdair could be gracious and forthcoming in his support for people, and not just as teacher to student. He called me when he heard that my father died when I was finishing my dissertation, and always began subsequent discussions with how I was doing. More than once his support was invaluable to me in the various political scrapes that I experienced, which in my youth were numerous. And he remained in his own way a fierce devotee of individuals and attitudes that were wrongly marginalized or dismissed. But Alasdair was not an exceptionally warm person, and in those years, I felt he was rather lonely. He celebrated values of community, but seemed change jobs and even cities every few years. I am so glad that he finally found the relationship/communities that he so treasured, though I had little contact with him in the last decades.

Alasdair MacIntyre spent five and a half years at Duke University (1995-2000); he joined the Philosophy Department along with his wife, Lynn Sumida Joy. I had applied to the PhD program at Duke in the fall of 1994, before he was on the faculty; I was subsequently told that he had participated in the review of the applicants that year and that he had spoken to them about my application, which had degrees from Ireland and England, but not the U.S. (the Philosophy Department at the time did not have not have very many international students). I credit him, therefore, with my acceptance for the PhD program. I was extremely fortunate to subsequently have him as my dissertation supervisor (1998-2000). Although I chose to write on ethics rather than early modern philosophy for my dissertation in part because of the job market, it was also in part because I hoped to have him as my supervisor. In typical MacIntyre fashion, he told me that he would only supervise me if I promised to finish the dissertation in two years, since he was going to retire and leave Durham, N.C., after two more years. (I promised, and I kept my promise). My dissertation was on the history of metaethics in the first half of the twentieth century, an area that he was intimately familiar with; however, I think everyone would agree that he could have supervised a dissertation on just about anything. Many years later, I was happy to rework one of the chapters of my dissertation into an essay, “MacIntyre and the Emotivists,” for a collection of essays in his honor (What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Fran O’Rourke (2013)).  

I took two graduate seminars with him while I was taking courses, one on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and one on ethics in the twentieth century (which was really on metaethics – hence my eventual dissertation topic). They were the best courses I took as a graduate student. Whenever I teach Aristotle, his voice is in my head. Again, in typical MacIntyre fashion, he did not assign his own writings in either course; the main text for the history of ethics course was a text by R. M. Hare. I believe it was in that seminar that he said what he has written elsewhere, namely, that Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) influenced his After Virtue (1981), and that he was sympathetic to Bernard Williams’ critique of “the morality system” – but that he wanted to historicize it. (In a footnote, Williams was later to famously compare himself to MacIntyre as follows: “If Taylor and MacIntyre will forgive my putting them into a mere cartoon sketch, one set of relations between our positions might perhaps be put like this: Taylor and MacIntyre are Catholic, and I am not; Taylor and I are liberals, and MacIntyre is not; MacIntyre and I are pessimists, and Taylor is not (not really)” (“Replies” in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics (1995), 222 n. 19)). 

MacIntyre taught undergraduate courses throughout his time at Duke and he did all of his own grading of undergraduate papers and blue book exams. The absence of any training for teaching and grading was one of the reasons I was never his TA (I don’t believe his TA’s ever guest taught a class with him observing them, as other faculty did), but I did sit in on an undergraduate courses on the history of ethics. He was wont to make the odd provocative remark when lecturing the Duke undergrads. One such instance was when he talked about the great city of Beirut and how terrible it was to hear about it being bombed, to which he added, “Why couldn’t they bomb… Houston?”

MacIntyre had Irish roots and had spent summer holidays in his childhood in Donegal. Because I was Irish, he would talk to me, in particular, about matters Irish. What alarmed me is that he talked about the IRA Army Council and what they were up to as though he had an inside line to their meetings (via Chicago, somehow). I hoped that here, too, he was being provocative, since I grew up despising the IRA. His Irish identity and interest in Ireland was completely genuine, however. One of my proudest moments was when he asked me to ask my father, a philosopher and scholar of Irish, whom he had met when my parents visited me at Duke, for the proper Irish translation of “Dasein.” In due course, my father replied with a short letter about the translation possibilities. Years later, when a collection of essays was put together in honor of my father’s retirement from teaching at University College Galway by his former students — essentially, a Festschrift — entitled Philosophy and Political Engagement (eds. Allyn Fives and Keith Breen (2016)), MacIntyre was kind enough to contribute an essay. 

Lest it seem from all of this that he gave me special treatment, I should add that one of my most ignominious moments at Duke occurred in one of his seminars. MacIntyre would often throw out a question to the seminar just to test how uneducated we all were. I sometimes survived the test (he once asked us what was the exchange between F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway about the rich; I (the Irishman) answered it correctly, and he then said to the rest of the class that they should at least have a modicum of knowledge of American culture). However, one day in the seminar he started to talk about Uriah Heep, and then pulled himself short. “In what novel is Uriah Heep a character?” he asked. Silence reigned. Something possessed me to pipe up, “Silas Mariner.” MacIntyre looked at me with that stern stare he reserved for such occasions. “That’s two books you haven’t read,” he said. 

From anecdotes such as this, it should be clear that he was very intimidating, even if he could be very entertaining. I never addressed him as anything except “Prof. MacIntyre” for my entire time at Duke. It sometimes felt a little like being in the presence of a mafia boss, or perhaps Ludwig Wittgenstein. You were happy to laugh with him when he found something amusing, but you were terrified in case you would say the wrong thing. He once told me something that may not have been, literally, a joke, but that revealed his particular brand of humor. He said, a propos of lying, that if he ever did lie to me, I should be very grateful, since his only other option would have been to kill me. I remember once daring to engage with him when it came to this kind of humor. He had said, “If I could shoot everyone who called me a communitarian…” To which I replied, “You may not have enough bullets.” He nodded and said that I might be right.

I have mentioned something he said about lying; this is my excuse to say even more about the topic. It is not, I think, as widely acknowledged as it should be that MacIntyre wrote extensively about the ethics of lying. His Tanner Lectures were on the subject (“Truthfulness, Lies, and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant?” (1994)) and he wrote the entry on lying for the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (ed. Ted Honderich (1995)). He is directly responsible for my own writing on the subject of lying. As a graduate student, I was told by another graduate student that in a seminar MacIntyre had defended the absolute prohibition on lying, which is identified with Kant. I wrote a short piece – hardly an essay – in which I provided examples of justified lies taken from fiction (one example was from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep), and dropped it in his mailbox. He never replied, and we never talked about it. But sometime later I started to think that Kant might in fact be right about lying being absolutely prohibited. This led to my first conference paper on Kant on lies, while still a graduate student; it became my job talk paper, and eventually, my first article. I like to think that, in this respect if in no other, by writing on the subject of lying I am carrying his mantle.

I will close by saying the most important thing that I can say about him: he was very good to me. In addition to letting me write the dissertation I wanted to write, and letting me stop writing when I thought I had written enough, he performed the most important function that a dissertation supervisor can perform: he got everyone on the committee to agree to a date for the defense. And one thing was for certain — nobody, absolutely nobody, was going to back out of that commitment (they were too scared of him). After the defense (he did not actually ask me any questions; he gave his time to the others), he and Lynn took me out to lunch at a place on Ninth Street, and he even drove me there in his car. He had worn a tie for the occasion, and he told me that he only wore ties to defenses and funerals. His car, I remember, was not fancy, and I am not even certain if it had air conditioning or if it worked particularly well. But he drove us there and of course treated me to the lunch (or they did). That was the kind of man he was. Despite being an eminent academic, he always made time for other people, and he always did everything himself. He once said that he did not trust anyone who did not wash their own dishes. Whatever about my work as a philosopher, I do like to think that he would have been pleased with my work as a dean, helping my faculty and students — being good to them, as he was to me.