By Joseph R. Wood.

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on May 21.

MacIntyre was born in Scotland and, after education in Britain, moved to the United States. He taught at several universities, including Duke, Yale, Princeton, Vanderbilt, and finally Notre Dame. There, with Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon and John Finnis, he was also a Permanent Senior Distinguished Research Fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. He was a friend and admirer of Notre Dame's Ralph McInerny, a Thomistic scholar and founding contributor to The Catholic Thing.

MacIntyre's academic career centered on moral philosophy: how we know and choose the good and right, or how we avoid evil and do good. His contributions in this field were immense.

MacIntyre began his philosophical career as a Marxist and critic of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy, until he discovered one day that he had become an Aristotelian-Thomist. He retained elements of his critique of capitalism and its associated modern political form of liberal democracy throughout his career.

But his antidote to the problems of capitalism and modern democracy was rather different than that of Marx.

MacIntyre's most famous work is After Virtue, published in 1981. He begins that work by noting that many of our political debates that carry the greatest moral freight - those we might associate with what others have called "culture wars" - seem to be interminable and irresolvable.

We have lost the ability to reason together about these questions, because we have forgotten a common vocabulary that once enabled us in the West to think and argue seriously about moral truth. He traces how this loss came about, with the result that our discourse is now dominated by "emotivism." The emotivist argues, or at least acts on the premise, that "all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, attitude. . .or feeling."

In other words, there is no logos or reason involved in our moral claims, just our feelings. We can't know anything objective or absolute about right and wrong, so there is no shared understanding of right and wrong. Our debates thus roll on without end, and the arts of persuasion serve not truth but the mere ephemeral and illusory pursuit of power in corporations, government, media, education, and other domains.

From this tour of the history of philosophy and where the recent centuries of that history have landed us, MacIntyre attempts to restore and strengthen the Aristotelian-Thomist virtue tradition by introducing concepts such as "practice," by which he means "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence. . .appropriate to that form of activity."

Through practices, we become virtuous, and we extend human powers of excellence and achieve good.

When we learn to play chess well, we develop the "internal goods" of knowing what it is to play chess with excellence. "External goods" - praise or monetary rewards that go with recognition of our excellence - might follow, but they only reflect the internal goods we achieve as excellence of practice.

MacIntyre was a football fan, and being an excellent football player and member of the team is another example of practice. What MacIntyre would have thought about transfer portals and "name, image, and likeness" agreements that place money over college loyalty, I don't know. But he did have a reputation for being sharply acerbic.

We learn these virtues of practices in small communities that seek a common good, and the practices themselves - handed down to us and to be handed on - shape our understanding of our lives as stories or narratives. These human narratives began before us and will continue beyond.

Peter Berkowitz, a superb political theorist and commentator, once remarked to me that After Virtue was a rare t...