Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition

by Alasdair MacIntyre

There are certainly hints of such a schism in Foucault, shown by occasional relapses from the genealogical standpoint, especially perhaps when later in life in interviews he succumbed to the temptation to be professorial in too encyclopaedic an explanatory mode.

They are those acts of disowning in and through which the genealogist begins and continues his or her separation from that against which through genealogical enquiry he or she is contending, by disclosing what he or she now takes to be the pretensions and crippling misrepresentations of, as it may be, Christianity, Judaism, the Socratic dialectic, the Platonic metaphysics, the theology of Augustine or Aquinas, the ethics of Kant or whatever. The function of genealogy as emancipatory from deception

From the genealogist’s standpoint the problems are not ones of discontinuities within continuities so much as of continuities within discontinuities.

Starts with the idea of person and identify - a sense of sel, continuity and evaluation This is missing in encyclopedic inquiry , and highly problem in genealogists - Only thomism and other traditional societies have answered this question