Raymond Geuss in Sidecar:
Alasdair MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025 at the age of 96, never got the memo informing him that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. He never thought that imagining the disembodied subject abstracted from its social context was a good starting point for anything, or that epistemology had philosophical priority, or that a principal task of philosophy was to defend the validity of our knowledge against sceptical doubt or to argue that some ‘ethical demands’ were ‘obligatory’. He certainly never received the notification issued at the start of the 20th century that henceforth philosophy would be essentially devoted to the analysis of language, the construction of formal arguments and the solution of logical puzzles. In contrast to all this his thought had a kind of archaic substantiality. He was one of the very few anglophone philosophers of the past two hundred years whom one could imagine emerging from the pages of Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius.
There are a number of reasons for this. He was, of course, erudite, highly intelligent and argumentatively incisive, but more importantly he instantiated an unusual form of the unity of thought and life. He had a remarkable ability to learn and willingness to change his position. At various times in his life he was a Marxist, a practising analytic philosopher, an Aristotelian, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, and eventually a Roman Catholic and Thomist-Aristotelian. At times he seemed close to psychoanalysis; he wrote knowledgeably about Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Edith Stein, various figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and a number of theologians. In the case of almost any other philosopher, one might think it a sign of flightiness, but actually it was a mark of intellectual integrity.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.