Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most important Catholic philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries, has died at the age of 96. Born in Scotland, he worked for the last decades at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA), where he died. His work has been decisive for the recovery of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues in moral and political Philosophy , especially in the Anglo-Saxon sphere.

His best known book is -precisely- Tras la virtud ( published in 1981 and edited in Spanish by Ed. Crítica in 1987). This work marked an intellectual turning point that was soon to be followed by his conversion to Catholicism (1983). It offered a sharp description of the moral fragmentation imposed by the moral theories and social practices of late modernity, and returned the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues to a position of intellectual and moral superiority. Among other issues, he pointed to emotivism - common to the various modern theories of morality - as the cause of the problem.

MacIntyre had a somewhat heterodox academic training , inspired by critical Marxism, which he combined with his political commitment to extreme left-wing groups. He felt that true moral research could only be carried out in the context of social practices. He taught at several British universities and began to develop his written work, marked by a critical view of modernity.

His intellectual evolution went hand in hand with staff change. He first left Europe to start working in the United States. This already signaled the overcoming of critical Marxism to embrace Aristotelianism. Eventually - in Justice and Rationality and in Three Rival Versions of Ethics -he adopted a decidedly non-neo-scholastic Thomism. This intellectual conversion, first intellectually and then religiously, recalls Chesterton (who was not yet a Catholic when he published Orthodoxy). And above all his admired Edith Stein, of whom he would publish an intellectual biography.

In any case, this change in his thinking did not bring him closer to the typical American "fusionist" conservatism (liberal in Economics, conservative in morals, nationalist in international affairs). His criticism was not limited to capitalism, but went deeper into the depths of the enlightened project . His social and political vision brought him closer to communitarianism, critical of political liberalism and individualism of all kinds. His great little work Dependent rational animals (in my opinion, the most persuasive and rounded) is an anthropological, ethical and political proposal based on the recognition of vulnerability and dependence. We need virtues and we learn them in social practices in which the common goods that allow human flourishing are cultivated.

Since 2010 he was Professor Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and focused his activity on the partnership with its Center for Ethics and Culture. It is in this context that I was able to meet him personally on the occasion of his lectures at the Fall Conference, all of which can be found at youtube. I never went to visit him in his office, discouraged by other colleagues. Some said "if you want to talk to him, you'll have to talk to him about the Beatles". These conferences generated great expectation. It was almost a ritual. The professor would sit down and read his lecture in his nasal, deliberately monotone voice. As in his written work, he displayed a great philosophical erudition, which allowed him to spin arguments with great fluency, threading the speech with literary references and scientific contributions, as well as with lessons learned from genuine forms of community life that subsist in the modern wasteland. Before he began he always flashed his incisive humor. On one occasion the lecture took place at the business school. He began: "This is the first time I am in this school. It will be the last. Implicit was his critique of managerialism and the forms of desire and work brought about by contemporary capitalism.

In his last work, mentioned above, he recovered a topic present from the beginning: the narrative character of human life, the centrality of literature to understand moral life and the need to recover the narrative unity of our existence. The book culminated with four biographical narrative essays of more or less unknown characters, who with their lives had to respond to the intellectual fragmentation and internship compartmentalization that we all experience in contemporary society. To do so, they were forced to develop a more or less explicit moral Philosophy , which conditioned their ability to integrate their existences in a satisfactory way. Reading MacIntyre is a challenge and an intellectual financial aid , but above all an existential one, which restores relevance and credibility to the Christian message, without being an apologetic.