Neta on Peacocke on Reason
Over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Ram Neta has a Review of Christopher Peacocke’s The Realm of Reason. Here is a taste:
- In this book, Peacocke attempts to provide a philosophical foundation for the enterprise of discovering the correct epistemological norms. He assumes that the enterprise is viable – that is, he assumes that there are discoverable norms that determine, for any given propositional content p, the conditions under which someone is entitled to p. He seems also to assume that some such principles have already been discovered, at least to some approximation. The aim of his book is not primarily to discover more such principles, but rather to explain the truth of the principles that have already (at least to some approximation) been discovered, and to propose a plan for explaining the truth of whatever further principles will eventually be discovered. Peacocke is not primarily interested in stating the correct function from propositional contents to conditions of entitlement; rather, he’s interested in explaining what makes it the case that a particular function is the correct one. This is the question to which rationalism constitutes one possible answer.