This essay explores the thorny issue of theory and practice, partly in response to the special issue of the Journal of Philosophy of Education (37.2, 2003) but more especially as a way of offering a critique of Joseph Dunne’s book, Back to the Rough Ground (1993). It argues that Dunne’s notion of phronetic techne risks the reduction of philosophy to the merely instrumental, and, in turn, that this approach threatens the significance of philosophical character.

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular faith (...) developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen. (shrink)