A Few Memories Of Alasdair MacIntyre

several recollections that convey the kind of person he was

Five days ago, a great contemporary philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. I got to know him a good bit, not just through his works, but through interactions and conversations a number of years back. I’ve mentioned at many times that, from my point of view, when it came to virtue ethics he was the real deal, someone who was committed to not only talking the proverbial talk, but walking the walk as well.

A good number of people who knew MacIntyre much better than I have shared their memories, insights, and perspectives in the last several days, and there have already been several retrospective pieces about his wide-ranging philosophical work. What that means for me is that, in this piece that I feel like writing to honor him, I can just stick to bringing up a few memories of my own that strike me as representative of his character.

Many people recount having read After Virtue as their first encounter with MacIntyre’s thought. That was one of the books in our recommended reading list for our value fields preliminary examination, and I did read it fairly early on in my doctoral studies years, but the first work by MacIntyre I read was actually an interview he gave in our graduate school journal Kinesis. (I still have the copy of that issue packed away somewhere in my boxes).

Once I’d read After Virtue, like many I was hooked on the perspectives MacIntyre provided, and I quickly jumped into the second and longer book in what would become a tetraology, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (the other two being Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, and Dependent Rational Animals).

I met MacIntyre in the summer of 2005, when I was selected to be one of twelve in the Erasmus Institute Faculty seminar at Notre Dame University. I saw that it was led by MacIntyre that year, and that the title was “Practical Rationality: Decision Theory, Aquinas, Lacan”, so I applied. The chance to work closely with MacIntyre alone made it worth applying for, and the fact that I also had a solid background in the three traditions the seminar would focus on gave me some hope that I might actually get accepted.

I was by far the most junior and least accomplished of all of the faculty selected for the fellowship. As I discovered later on in conversation with MacIntyre, one of the main reasons I got in was that he was interested to talk with me about my experience teaching maximum security inmates in Ball State University’s 4-year college program at Indiana State Prison. MacIntyre was concerned his entire career with the humanity, development, and education of ordinary people, and how institutions (including prisons) conditioned their lives and prospects.

The seminar was pretty extraordinary. For two weeks, we were housed on campus at Notre Dame. All of us participants had our meals together at one of the campus cafeterias, and we often got together in the evenings. During the morning and afternoon, we were in intensive seminars led by MacIntyre, who put ideas and observations before us about the texts and thinkers he’d selected, and encouraged discussion and debate, as well as indulging occasional off-topic inquiries.

MacIntyre also made time for each of the participants to have a 1-on-1 conversation with him about their own research projects over the course of the two weeks. Since I lived only 90 minutes from Notre Dame at the time, and would make farily frequent trips to use the Hesburg Library for my ongoing research work, I put off our meeting to later in the Fall.

I met him at his office, and we had a lengthy conversation, which did touch upon my experiences and observations with prison teaching, but also involved him effectively picking my brain about two different French thinkers whose work he admitted he didn’t know that well. One was the philosopher on whom I had written my dissertation, Maurice Blondel, and the other was a philosopher who I saw similarities to MacIntyre in, Gabriel Marcel. We ranged over a number of other topics as well, in what became a rather personal conversation.

Then we went over to one of the cafeterias to have lunch together and continue our conversation. He told me to bring my dossier along with me, since he would head off to class afterwards, and the conversation shifted to the classes he was teaching. I discovered something very striking. At that time MacIntyre was not only a member of the philosophy department but also a fellow of the Center for Ethics and Culture. He could teach any class he wanted, or even not teach if he chose. Instead, he deliberately chose to teach Introduction to Philosophy.

I asked him why he chose to do that, a decision on his part that I already respected as someone who by that point had myself taught such required “service classes” to non-majors for years. He looked straight at me and said slowly that he had come to the view that these were by far the most important students to teach philosophy classes to, and since he could do it, he would. (He also mentioned that some of his colleagues took the view that he was squandering his time and talents a bit with these undergrads).

I crossed paths with MacIntyre a number of times in the next several years, mainly at conferences. I was always on the job market, which was a rather miserable experience much of the time, in those years. MacIntyre gladly wrote a letter of recommendation for me, knowing quite well what the market looked like, how arbitrary the decisions made in it could be, and that his vouching for me might give a guy from a non-elite school, teaching in a prison, somewhat better prospects.

There’s a phrase that comes from the Letter of James, where Christians are told that they should not be “respecters of persons”, meaning that they shouldn’t treat some people better because they have wealth, prestige, connections, and others worse because they lack those. Quite frankly, I was an academic nobody at those conferences where we ran across each other, but invariably, when MacIntyre saw me, he would excuse himself and amble over to greet me, and then would ask me about how my own work was going and about my family.

I’ll mention one other interesting memory that to me was both entirely in character for him and revealed his mindset to me. My prison job ended when the state of Indiana cut those educational programs, and I had to get onto the job market late in the game. I had two offers, and I took the one from Fayetteville State University, at that time a struggling HBCU in North Carolina that was until recent years the most dysfunctional place I ever taught.

All of us new faculty arrived there for Fall 2008 without a contract. They were in process of firing the chancellor and replacing her. Although we were expected to keep office hours, they didn’t provide us with any office space until after Thanksgiving. There was no philosophy program, just a minor, and we philosophy professors typically taught four sections of a required Critical Thinking class each semester. The students, with some exceptions, were rather underprepared for college, and the standards for admission were very low.

I wrote to MacIntyre and mentioned the state of the institution, which I knew he would be interested to know. He wrote me back, and the one thing that really stuck out to me from his response was the point that he made about the students at FSU. I’m paraphrasing, since that letter was from close to two decades back. MacIntyre said that he knew it must be frustrating for me to work and teach in a place like that. And that my capacities might seem to be wasted on the students there, since I could be doing good work in many other places.

But the point he wanted to stress was that those students deserved to have a teacher like me, who was competent, devoted to our field, and able to successfully reach and work with students who weren’t well-prepared for college. While he could understand me continuing to look for work elsewhere, it would be a good thing both for my students for me to stay there with them at FSU as long as I could. I remember him putting it along these lines: you deserve to teach in a better place, and that’s why those students at FSU deserve to have a teacher like you.

Those three sets of memories — the conversation after the seminar, our crossing paths at conferences, and the letter about my students — are enough for me to write about, I think. There’s more that could be said, but there’s already so much being said that perhaps in this case less is more. And so this is a good place to end for now.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.