Talbot Brewer responds.(BOOK FORUM)(practice of philosophy; 'The Retrieval of Ethics')(Essay)

I'm grateful to Rai Gaita, Tim Chappell, and Nick Wolterstorff for these thought-provoking comments on the closing words of my book, where I wanted to say something about the telos of theoretical reflection that did not fit comfortably within any recognized philosophical specialization. I had argued that the telos was not propositional knowledge, which can be irredeemably trivial even in large quantities, but actualized understanding of the world and our place in it. This latter claim did not fit within the one field of contemporary philosophy that focuses on norms of theoretical reflection--namely epistemology--because most epistemologists assume that the proper subject of their inquiry is knowledge (despite the fact that "understanding" is arguably a more apt translation of the Greek episteme than "knowledge"). This troubled me because an important philosophical question was marked for neglect by the prevailing segmentation of professional philosophy.

The problem would not have appeared so grave if the proper aim of theoretical reflection were merely …