Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy

Volume 7, Issue 2, Spring 2003

Readings of Ancient Greek Philosophy: In Memory of Seth Benardete

The Nature of Reason and the Sublimity of First Philosophy
Toward a Reconfiguration of Aristotelian Interpretation

By reference to the Aristotelian meditation, this essay undertakes to articulate an understanding of phronesis and sophia, praxis and theoria, in their belonging together. In so doing, it strives to overcome the traditional opposition of these terms, an opposition preserved even by those thinkers, such as Gadamer and Arendt, who have emphasized the practical over against the theoretical simply by inverting the order of the hierarchy. What is at stake, ultimately, is thinking ethics as first philosophy, i.e., seeing the philosophical articulation of scientific knowledge, even of ontology, as resting on (belonging in) living-in-action, as phenomenologically, phenomenally, sensibly grounded. Of course, “ethics as first philosophy” here can mean neither a normative-prescriptive compilation nor a self-founding, autonomous discourse. Rather, the phrase names the comprehensiveness of ethics vis-à-vis all manner of human endeavor and the openness of ethics vis-à-vis that which exceeds it, that which is irreducible to discourse and in which the ethical discourse belongs.