Alasdair MacIntyre died on Wednesday. He was one of the most important moral philosophers of our day, and a major figure in the revival of virtue ethics. In the fifties and sixties, he was a significant voice in Marxist theory, and while he eventually stopped being Marxist, Marxism set him on a course to think through matters of social ideology and the role of institutions in changes in ideas. In the eighties he became Catholic, and it was in the eighties and nineties that he began publishing the works for which he is best known: After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), his Gifford lectures, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, Tradition (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999).
