Charles Mathewes in The Hedgehog Review:
The first time I met Alasdair MacIntyre I was twenty-one, and he threatened to kill one of my classmates. Then he told us all that our attention to his work was “profoundly misbegotten.” It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year at Georgetown University, and my capstone seminar was dedicated to reading everything the Scottish-born philosopher had written up to that point. (It was a lot.) At the end of the semester, he came for a full day of discussion. To call it “vigorous” and “frank” would suggest we were auditioning for the State Department.
As I recall, he mocked those who did not like the Red Sox (or possibly those who did?). At another point, he suggested that, if we were in Ireland, he would have been entitled to kill one of my classmates. Undoubtedly, though, the most memorable moment for me came at lunch, when one of us asked him a question that was really a barely disguised invitation for him to congratulate us on our class’s dedication to his writings. He was having none of it. “Oh, I think your class is profoundly misbegotten,” he said. “If you had understood anything of what I have written, you would have immediately stopped reading my work and turned to an intensive study of Aristotle and Aquinas.”
Today these sorts of things would, shall we say, not go well as pedagogically acceptable methods of interacting with students. But we knew how to take it—that is, not personally—and so instead of being offended or feeling threatened, we learned.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.