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The more I reflected on my answers, the more I wondered whether they might not bear somehow on answering my continuing question about the distinctive concern of philosophy. Could it be, I asked myself, that the defining, unifying concern of philosophy, qua love of wisdom, is precisely self-understanding and life-praxis? 

Wiki MarkupThe distinction essential to an answer, I decided, is that between our self-understanding and life-praxis simply as human beings in the ultimate setting of our lives (which includes our also being situated in _some_ immediate setting\[s\]); and our self-understanding and life-praxis as participants in all the various undertakings that Whitehead refers to as "the directed activities of mankind," and Wittgenstein calls "Lebensformen/Sprachspielen." Given this distinction between two main kinds of life-settings, ultimate and immediate, doing philosophy may be said to have a "center" as well as a "periphery." Although its peripheral (but, for all of that, important\!) concern is all the different ways of understanding ourselves and leading our lives in the various regions within which they are set (some of which, notably, religion, have a direct, or explicit, connection with their ultimate setting, others of which are connected with that ultimate setting only indirectly or implicitly, their direct or explicit connection being with some region or other of our lives' immediate setting only), its central concern is self-understanding and life-praxis in our ultimate setting simply as human beings. In either kind of setting---immediate as well as ultimate---philosophy, being concerned with wisdom, is concerned with self-understanding and life-praxis, in the sense of the normative understanding of ourselves and of leading our lives accordingly, or, as may also be said, with our identity and action, peripherally as well as centrally, in our various possible offices as well as simply as persons.

As for why philosophy inevitably turns to metaphysics and ethics, I concluded that they are indispensable to pursuing its central concern with a normative understanding of our identity and action in the ultimate setting of our lives simply as human beings. On the other hand, I concluded that philosophy includes all of the peripheral philosophical disciplines that it is ordinarily understood to include (philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, philosophy of law, etc.), because it is also concerned with normative understanding of what it is to do any of the things that we typically do as human beings, as reflected in our "directed activities," or in "the forms of life"/"the language games" that typify our engagement with reality, nondiscursive as well as discursive.

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