Abstract I respond in detail to the five authors whose contributions to this Special Edition are their critical reflections on my book Epiphanies (OUP 2022). After some reflections—drawn partly from Plato—on what it is for one text to defend another text, I argue that an important alternative to systematic theory, which I in fact have been seeking to develop in one way or another in nearly all of my central work on normative ethics, right back to 1998, is to centre our thinking not just upon ethical experience and epiphanies, but also on the neo-Aristotelian exemplarist notion of the phronimos. Making this and other connections can shed light on the senses in which we can, and cannot, rank-organise the various goods that we encounter through (some of) our epiphanies; the senses in which I do, and do not, myself seek to do “moral theory”; what we can do with the notion of an external reason, and what we cannot; and the senses in which it might be reasonable to hope for moral or political progress to result from dialogue or conversation about our epiphanies—and might not.
Sophie Grace Chappell (Thu,) studied this question.