Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. His book, After Virtue (1981), is one of the most important works of moral and political philosophy of the twentieth century. From 1951, he taught at the universities of Manchester, Leeds, Essex, and Oxford. Moving to the US in 1969, he held professorships at Brandeis, Wellesley, Vanderbilt, Yale, and Duke. He became Senior Research Professor in Philosophy at Notre Dame in 2000 and Emeritus Professor in 2010. He retired as Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics at London Metropolitan University.
President of the American Philosophical Society, he was awarded the Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2010. MacIntyre is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the Royal Irish Academy. He was awarded several honorary degrees, notably by Swarthmore College and Queen’s University, Belfast. Important works include A Short History of Ethics (1966), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Dependent Rational Animals (1999), Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (2005).