Dr Kelvin Knight remembers his London Met colleague, who passed away on 22 May 2025.
Date: 23 May 2025
Widely regarded as the world’s greatest living moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre was extraordinarily generous to London Metropolitan University during his decade of work with us. His public lectures filled our largest theatres, not only with students but also with people who travelled from around the world to hear him speak.
Believing the University to be a more deserving cause than himself, he paid for his own accommodation and travel from his home in the US to teach undergraduate, MA and doctoral students here. In this, the author of After Virtue truly exemplified the moral and intellectual virtues about which he wrote. He walked the talk.
During his time here, from 2010 to 2020, he served as Senior Research Fellow at CASEP, our Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics. For several years, London Met was his only official academic base. Although the Centre’s closure here marked ended his formal ties to the University, he remained deeply interested in our mission, our research, and our students.
His major research project while at London Met, Common Goods and Political Reasoning, was intended to be published as The Politics of the Common Good In and Against the Politics of the Modern State. Instead, it became Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (Cambridge, 2016), his final book and a powerful summation of his life’s work.
The papers developed through this project, previously shared only in closed symposia, will be published for the first time in 2026 as Alasdair MacIntyre on Practical Philosophy: Essential Works by University of Notre Dame Press. His legacy continues through the research of our PhD students Joe Simpson and Zorana Novakovic.
Saturday 24 May
Members of the London Met community will attend the online event On the Enlightenment.
For details, email: k.knight@londonmet.ac.uk
Tuesday 27 May
Expanding Traditions: Deploying Alasdair MacIntyre in Social Sciences and Human Service professions
For details, contact Reiss Kruger: rkruger1@yorku.ca
10-12 July
A delegation from the University will travel to the University of Pennsylvania for the 18th annual conference of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME).
For details, contact Quinn Moore: isme2025@macintyreanenquiry.org
ISME traces its foundation to a landmark conference held at London Met’s Graduate Centre. That event also led to two edited books and two special journal issues. Like the Society, members of this University remain committed to advancing MacIntyre’s ideas. Together, standing on the shoulders of a giant, we will continue his work.
Pic: Alasdair MacIntyre speaking at an event
Further reading: Alasdair MacIntyre obituary - The Guardian
