MacIntyre helped to change my life

HAVE you ever had a moment that changed you forever?

- Ron Beadle

In 1997 I read a book chapter by the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

I would never be the same again. His work explained the relationship between the tensions in my own moral and political reasoning and the fragmented reasoning of our social order. He explained my road block and enabled me to get past it.

That first chapter began with a story of mistaken identity at a bus stop. MacIntyre used this opening fiction (often his method) to make an argument about the dependence of knowledge on context. We can only make sense of people when we know the background of their beliefs and intentions and the histories of the settings they inhabit. The argument was not new, but I had never read it expressed with such élan, such cogency.

I was already an academic and I had studied at LSE, one of the best universities in the world. I had been taught by some brilliant people, read and heard lectures by legends including Sir Karl Popper, but I had never come across a mind like MacIntyre's. I knew I had to read more, in fact, to read everything he had written. And that was a lot. MacIntyre wrote his first book at the age of 23 in the 1950s. His final book was decades away, published in 2016.