Professor Alasdair MacIntyre (senior research fellow)
Alasdair has written widely in philosophy since his first book, Marxism: An Interpretation, appeared in 1953. He has taught at Oxford University, Princeton University, Brandeis University, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt University, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame, where he was research fellow in the Center for Ethics and Culture before moving to the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) on 1 July 2010. His After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Duckworth and University of Notre Dame Press, 2007, 3rd edition) remains the most important text in the reestablishment of virtue ethics. He has made great contributions to the history of philosophy, to moral philosophy, to the philosophy of politics and social sciences, and, especially, to the renewal of Aristotelianism and to its challenge to rival traditions. His recent books include an examination of the philosophical work of Edith Stein set against the background of twentieth-century phenomenology entitled Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005; Continuum, 2006), God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), and two volumes of his selected essays, The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and Politics (both Cambridge UP, 2006). His work informs that of many others, across a range of disciplines, and has inspired the creation of an International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry. At CASEP, he is leading a major research project on Common Goods and Political Reasoning.
Dr Tolis Malakos (visiting research fellow, 2010-)
Tolis has previously written on Tocqueville, Weber, Habermas and the philosοphical discourse of modernity, and on nation-building and nationalism. In the UK, he has taught at the London School of Economics and Queen Mary, University of London, and was co-founder of the public forum Polis. He spent 2009 in Munich and Berlin working on Goethe and Heidegger. He is currently working on late Heidegger and the Greeks, and the relationship between virtue and truth. Tolis is also interested in poetry and mythology and has just published Το Μετρο του Χρονου (The Measure of Time; Govostis, 2011) on the relationship between deity and mythos in Homer and Dante. Primarily based in Greece, his work in London with CASEP presently includes leading both the weekly Aristotle reading group and the research project on Dasein as αληθευειν: An Aristotelian Reading of Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Professor Andrius Bielskis (visiting research fellow, 2010-15)
Andrius is Professor of Political Theory at Mykolas Romeris University, and a leading public intellectual in Lithuania. Previously, he was Professor at ISM University of Management and Economics. He received his MA in Politics from the University of York and PhD in Philosophy from the University of Warwick, and has taught political and moral philosophy at several British and European universities. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and of Towards a Post-Modern Understanding of the Political (Palgrave, 2005). Andrius is a founding member both of the progressive intellectual and political movement New Left 95 and of the DEMOS Institute of Critical Thought. He also writes political commentaries for the Lithuanian daily Delfi.lt. By these means, he promotes civil activism and a vibrant civil society. His research focusses on the utilisation of virtue ethics in constructing an alternative political, economic and institutional order in our post-modern world. He is also interested in the visual arts (especially film) and their impact on our perception of ourselves and the world, operationalising a “genealogy of kitsch” in relating cultural forms to consumer capitalism. He has been awarded three years of research leave by the Research Council of Lithuania, which he will use to write a book (for publication in both Lithuanian and English) on structures of meaning, and has been appointed an adviser to the prime minister of Lithuania, Algirdas Butkevičius.