ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides some useful help not only in responding to Putnam's challenge, but also in the efforts to answer the three big questions of practical and political philosophy. If people follow Aristotle's example in undertaking an empirical search for an actual implementation of the ideal type, it is not clear that they will be much more successful than was he; the ideal polls remains as elusive now as it was in ancient Greece. Any normative system of ethics or of rationality must remain an open one, subject to the revisions generated by the insights of further inquiry and reflection. The search for a definitively conclusive right model is thus not only futile, but also deeply inconsistent with what little philosophers have learned about practical philosophy over the centuries.
