The last three chapters have advanced a theory of doing philosophy historically. The next three chapters deal more with practice. They present a series of case studies: close readings of a number of philosophers who do philosophy historically. This chapter contains the first. It deals with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, and with the concern for philosophical pictures that runs through MacIntyre's rich and varied body of work. It traces the ways in which MacIntyre has tried, at every stage of his career, to learn philosophical lessons by engaging with the history of thought. I want to present MacIntyre as an example of the critical approach to doing philosophy historically. His work is best seen as an attempt to criticize a prominent philosophical picture, one that he calls the enlightenment project. MacIntyre's critique of this picture is historical through and through. He uses historical considerations both to point out this picture's defects, and to develop an alternative to it.

My study of MacIntyre falls into five parts. First, I will discuss MacIntyre's early work, which contains important anticipations of the historical approach he adopts later in his career. I will then turn to his best-known work, After Virtue, and to the critique of the enlightenment project advanced in this book. The next two sections will examine MacIntyre's search for an alternative to the enlightenment project in two later works: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.