My talk offers two historical projects that can help us think about the place of theories of reason or rationality in the history of philosophy.  The first project considers the logical empiricist notion of "rational reconstruction" as the proper goal of philosophy of science. It stresses the need to pay close attention to the philosophical context of logical empiricism to understand the import of this appeal to reason--in particular to understand with what reason or rationality in rational reconstruction is meant to contrast. The second project looks at the tools by which logical empiricism and other projects in early analytic philosophy converted philosophy into a technical discipline. This is a case of a form of technical know-how becoming central to philosophy itself. I argue that the place of logic in early analytic philosophy is best theorized as a sort of conceptual technology self-consciously chosen to induce a new level of technical competence in philosophy. The first project offers logical empiricism as a resource for thinking about why philosophy might want a theory of rationality; the second project offers logical empiricism as a topic in a nascent discipline looking at the history of philosophical know-how.