Killeen Chair of Theology & Philosophy Lecture "Alasdair MacIntyre's Influence on 20th & 21st Century Philosophy," by Peter Wicks, Ph. D.

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As part of the Killeen Chair of Theology & Philosophy Speaker Series, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Peter Wicks to speak at St. Norbert College.

In honor of the one-year anniversary of well-known philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's death on May 21, 2025, Dr. Wicks will share his lecture on MacIntyre's contributions to 20th and 21st century philosophy. In a remarkable career spanning seven decades, Alasdair MacIntyre established himself as a singular and influential voice in Anglophone philosophy. Accounts of MacIntyre's influence that treat him as the originator of the revival of "virtue ethics" in contemporary moral philosophy are not wrong - MacIntyre's work unquestionably played a major role in the revival of interest in virtue-based approaches to ethics - but they do risk underestimating the radicalism of MacIntyre's critique of moral philosophy. What he saw in Aristotle was not simply an unjustly neglected moral theory, but a conception of the proper relationship between theory and practice that challenged fundamental assumptions about how moral philosophy should be done. Attending to this aspect of MacIntyre's Aristotelianism can help us to understand both why some of his most important insights have proved hard to assimilate into contemporary moral philosophy and why his writings have been influential far beyond the academy.

A post-reception of beverages and desserts will follow.

Dr. Wicks is a Scholar-in-Residence at Elm Institute which is an independent center of philosophical inquiry established alongside Yale University.

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