Christopher Peacocke’s A Study of Concepts is a dense and rewarding work. Each chapter raises many issues for discussion. I know three different people who are writing reviews of the volume. It testifies to the depth of Peacocke’s book that each reviewer is focusing on a quite different set of topics.

The introduction introduces the subject matter and the main argument of The Realm of Reason and situates the work in relation to a number of the author's previous works.

The penultimate chapter of The Realm of Reason discusses the relation between the author's moral rationalism and a thorough moral realism and the question of whether a moral rationalist can hold that moral properties are sometimes involved in causal explanations. In reply, The author introduces what he calls the Eirenic Combination, which holds that causal explanation of a priori moral beliefs by moral facts is excluded by the a priori status of those beliefs; but this is compatible with the moral (...) properties mentioned in the a priori principles playing a significant part in empirical explanations, which they sometimes do. He then defends his moral rationalism against the charge that it is incompatible with the extensive role moral emotions play in our ordinary first‐level moral thought. (shrink)

States and defends the second principle of rationalism, The Rationalist Dependence Thesis, which holds that the rational truth‐conduciveness of any given transition to which a thinker is entitled is to be philosophically explained in terms of the nature of the intentional contents and states involved in the transition. The second principle, therefore, explains what it means for a transition to lead to true judgements in ‘a distinctive way characteristic of rational transitions’: if the reliability of that transition can be seen (...) to follow from the nature of those contents and states, then the transition is one to which the thinker is entitled. The remainder of Ch. 2 elucidates and paves the way for the author's argument for the Rationalist Dependence Thesis: the author identifies two tasks for a rationalist to support the thesis for content‐endorsing transitions, namely to show why the content of perceptual entitling states will tend to be true and to show why the transition to the judgement of the content made rational by the entitling perceptual state is truth‐conducive when the entitling state has a correct content. The first task is judged to be the greater challenge and three levels of the entitlement relation are distinguished from one another, each level differing from the others in terms of generality and explanatory power. (shrink)

States and defends the third principle of rationalism, The Generalised Rationalist Thesis, which holds that all instances of the entitlement relation, both absolute and relative, are fundamentally a priori. Even if a thinker's entitlement to a transition is provided by certain experiences of hers, her entitlement to make that transition from those experiences cannot itself be provided by certain experiences of hers. The author defends the third principle by appeal to two considerations: first, if the epistemological significance of experience was (...) itself not knowable a priori, then making any particular transition on the basis of that experience could not be rational, and so a thinker could not be entitled to make that transition. Thus, if we are to be entitled to make any transition on the basis of experience, the principle that entitles us to make that transition must be knowable a priori, whether or not we happen to know it. The second consideration in defence of the third principle rests on a general conception of what it is for a proposition or transition to be a priori. According to this conception, a proposition or transition is a priori just in case its truth or truth‐conduciveness can be explained from the nature of its content, or of the states that it involves. According to this conception, the third principle is a corollary of the first two principles, and so our defence of those two principles should serve to defend the third principle as well. (shrink)

States and defends the first principle of rationalism, The Special Truth‐Conduciveness Thesis, which illustrates the connection between entitlement to form a given belief and the belief's truth. The principle holds that a fundamental and irreducible part of what makes a transition one to which a thinker is entitled is that the transition tends to lead to true judgements in a distinctive way characteristic of rational transitions. The author then defends this principle and its commitments against a variety of challenges, notably (...) against two extreme views on the role the notion of evidence plays in the individuation of concepts and meanings. On one view evidence has no part at all to play in the individuation of concepts, and on the other, Quinean, view meanings are not merely partially, but exclusively a matter of certain evidential relations. The author challenges both views and suggests a middle way which his Generalised Rationalism is able to tread. (shrink)

Due to constraints on institutional capacity and financial resources, the road to universal health coverage (UHC) involves difficult policy choices. To assist with these choices, scholars and policy makers have done extensive work on criteria to assess the substantive fairness of health financing policies: their impact on the distribution of rights, duties, benefits and burdens on the path towards UHC. However, less attention has been paid to the procedural fairness of health financing decisions. The Accountability for Reasonableness Framework (A4R), which (...) is widely applied to assess procedural fairness, has primarily been used in priority-setting for purchasing decisions, with revenue mobilization and pooling receiving limited attention. Furthermore, the sufficiency of the A4R framework’s four criteria (publicity, relevance, revisions and appeals, and enforcement) has been questioned. Moreover, research in political theory and public administration (including deliberative democracy), public finance, environmental management, psychology, and health financing has examined the key features of procedural fairness, but these insights have not been synthesized into a comprehensive set of criteria for fair decision-making processes in health financing. A systematic study of how these criteria have been applied in decision-making situations related to health financing and in other areas is also lacking. This paper addresses these gaps through a scoping review. It argues that the literature across many disciplines can be synthesized into 10 core criteria with common philosophical foundations. These go beyond A4R and encompass equality, impartiality, consistency over time, reason-giving, transparency, accuracy of information, participation, inclusiveness, revisability and enforcement. These criteria can be used to evaluate and guide decision-making processes for financing UHC across different country income levels and health financing arrangements. The review also presents examples of how these criteria have been applied to decisions in health financing and other sectors. (shrink)

Among the unpublished writings of Kazimierz Twardowski so far there is an essay in which Twardowski tries to embed the concept of an intentional object' within a theory that comprises at the same time psychological, logical and grammatical aspects. This theory of actions' and products' is presented here and several applications of the theory are discussed. The central question thereby is whether the distinction between actions and products enables Twardowski to counter the objection of psychologism raised against him. Having explained (...) Twardowski's position we describe from an editorial point of view the text in which his theory is transmitted. The text itself is published according to the given editorial principles after this introduction. (shrink)

This is a review of Christopher Peacocke's book The Realm of Reason (Oxford University Press, 2004).

In this book, Christopher Peacocke proposes a general theory about what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. This theory is distinctively rationalist: that is, it gives a large role to the a priori, while insisting that the propositions or contents that can be known a priori are not in any way “true in virtue of meaning” (and without in any other way denigrating these propositions as “trivial”, or as propositions that “tell (...) us nothing about the world”, or the like). Peacocke then applies this theory to several classical problems in epistemology — to the problem of how our sensory experiences can entitle us to form beliefs about the external world, to the problem of induction, and to the problem of what entitles us to form moral beliefs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste SystemChristopher S. QueenDr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System. By Christophe Jaffrelot. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. xiii + 205 pp.Outside of India, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar remains virtually unknown. Everyone knows that Mahatma Gandhi led the fight for Indian independence and that his nonviolent marches inspired Dr. King and the American civil rights movement. Most educated men (...) and women have heard of Nehru and some of the political and literary figures that India has produced in modern times. But few know of the first Untouchable to attend college, who went on to earn advanced degrees in the social sciences and law at Columbia University, the London School of Economics, and Grays Inn, who returned to India in the 1920s to launch a civil rights movement for Untouchables, [End Page 168] who drafted the constitution for the Republic of India as its first law minister, and who led a mass conversion to Buddhism weeks before this death.Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) is venerated by millions of Buddhist and low-caste followers in India today, and at the same time feared by politicians determined to preserve the Hindu caste system he vowed to destroy. Admirers call him Babasaheb Ambedkar or simply Baba, using a traditional term of respect for a guiding elder, and many use the greeting Jai Bhim (“Victory to Bhimrao”) within the Untouchable communities. Ambedkar is portrayed on ubiquitous wall calendars, public statues, and home altars alongside that of the Buddha, wearing a Western suit and tie, with the horn-rimmed glasses and pocket pens of a scholar and diplomat. Although widely regarded as a bodhisattva or Buddhist saint, he is never pictured in the robes of a holy man or entreated in prayer by his devotees. And while most of his campaigns for Untouchable human rights were driven back by the Hindu nationalists, many of the provisions of his path-breaking legislation were eventually adopted after his death. In the intervening decades, amid deepening polarization over his legacy, the state government of Maharashtra has published eighteen volumes of Ambedkar’s collected works and the government of India has bestowed on him its highest civilian honor, the Bharat Ratna.Given the dearth of Western scholarship on Ambedkar’s place in the history of modern India and the emergence of socially engaged Buddhism, I welcome Chris-tophe Jaffrelot’s Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System. As a social scientist and director of the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internatio-nales (CERI) who has published more than a dozen books on South Asian politics, Jaffrelot is well qualified to assess Ambedkar’s life and thought. Drawing on a wide range of materials on the social reform movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Ambedkar’s contributions to sociology and politics, the author aims to redress Ambedkar’s neglect by Indian scholars before the 1990s, when the low-caste movement began finally to gain traction. However, he does not address the anomaly of Ambedkar’s neglect by all but a small circle of Western authors.1The strength of Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability is its concise analysis of the geographical, political, and social context of Ambedkar’s career. Jaffrelot shows how British recruitment of the Mahars, members of Ambedkar’s lowly but numerous caste, for service in the colonial army resulted in disproportionate levels of literacy. Ambedkar was the fourteenth child in such a military family, whose father held the rank of major and served as a school master for the barracks. Both parents and all of Bhimrao’s uncles could read and write, compared to less than one percent of Mahars in village life. Moreover, in spite of his brilliance and determination, Ambedkar could not have continued his education without the financial support of Maratha maharajahs who opposed the Brahmins’ monopoly in education. “Ambedkar was the heir to a regional tradition; his struggle harked back to the anti-Brahmin movements which emerged in western Maharashtra from the mid-nineteenth century onward, a precocity that only the Dravidian South—the other key area of anti-Brahmin mobilization—could match.”Jaffrelot presents... (shrink)

The deepest beliefs’ about personal identity whose consequences Unger seeks to draw out are the beliefs of those who already share his theoretical convictions; and his pain-avoidance’ experiments show nothing unless one already assumes those convictions. If there is a risk’ that I may not survive a brain operation even though I know exactly which chunks of brain will be removed and replaced, that shows that I am a separate thing from my body and brain, about which the latter provide (...) normally reliable, but still fallible evidence. (shrink)