Ratio

ISSNs: 0034-0006, 1467-9329

31 found

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  1.  12
    Prime matter emergentism: Unity without reduction.Stephen Boulter - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):272-282.
    I am persuaded that the anti-reductionist stance of the Mistake-Making Theoretical Framework is fundamentally sound and will prove heuristically fruitful. But the very success of this framework generates a challenge. Many biologically informed metaphysicians have drawn striking conclusions from the fact that biology cannot be reduced to physics and chemistry. One such conclusion is John Dupré's “disunity of the sciences” thesis which follows upon the alleged “disorder of things.” These conclusions threaten to undermine assumptions underpinning the Mistake-Making Theoretical Framework. In (...)
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  2.  25
    Organisms, agency and Aristotle.James G. Lennox - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):341-357.
    There is a tension at the heart of Aristotle's understanding of organic activities, created by his appeals to the productive activities of craftsmen and his use of normative language to characterize the goals of such activities. In this paper I discuss two ways of interpreting Aristotle's teleology aimed at resolving this tension, and discuss a closely analogous tension at the heart of a number of contemporary defenses of teleological reasoning in biology.
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  3. Four false dichotomies in the study of teleology.Daniel W. McShea & Gunnar Babcock - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):358-372.
    The study of teleology is challenging in many ways, but there is a particular challenge that makes matters worse, distorting the conceptual space that has set the terms of debate. And that is the tendency to think about teleology in terms of certain long-established dichotomies. In this paper, we examine four such dichotomies prevalent in the literature on teleology, the notions that: 1) Teleological explanations are opposed to mechanistic explanations; 2) teleology must arise from processes operating either internal to an (...)
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  4.  18
    Introduction—Purpose in Biology: New directions.David S. Oderberg - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):269-271.
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  5.  10
    On the concept of ‘actively working at making a living’.Mark Okrent - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):283-296.
    Richard Dawkins has suggested that the explananda of Darwinian explanations are the existence and character of entities that actively work at making a living. This paper discusses three issues related to this suggestion. First, it offers an account of what it is to actively work at making a living in terms of counterfactuals. Second, the paper articulates why it is that the existence and character of entities that actively work at making a living might require a different kind of explanation (...)
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  6.  71
    Life is strongly emergent.Michele Paolini Paoletti - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):297-312.
    In this article, I argue that life is a strongly emergent phenomenon. For the project of drawing a real distinction between living and non-living beings cannot but appeal to strongly emergent powers. First, I introduce some features whose possession is typically taken to be sufficient for possessing life, i.e., Life-Sufficient Features (or LS-Features). I also clarify what I mean by “strongly emergent powers”. And I fully develop and illustrate my argument. Subsequently, I examine no less than 17 possible reactions to (...)
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  7.  34
    The property of goal‐directedness: Lessons from the dispositions debate.Matthew Tugby - 2024 - Ratio 37 (4):313-326.
    The system-property or ‘cybernetic’ theory of goals and goal-directedness became popular in the twentieth century. It is a theory that has reductionist and behaviourist roots. There are reasons to think that the system-property theory needs to be formulated in terms of counterfactuals. However, it proves to be difficult to formulate a counterfactual analysis of goal-directedness that is counterexample-free, non-circular, and non-trivial. These difficulties closely mirror those facing reductionists about dispositions, though the parallels between the two debates have been overlooked in (...)
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  8.  46
    Mathematical structuralism and bundle theory.Bahram Assadian - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):123-133.
    According to the realist rendering of mathematical structuralism, mathematical structures are ontologically prior to individual mathematical objects such as numbers and sets. Mathematical objects are merely positions in structures: their nature entirely consists in having the properties arising from the structure to which they belong. In this paper, I offer a bundle-theoretic account of this structuralist conception of mathematical objects: what we normally describe as an individual mathematical object is the mereological bundle of its structural properties. An emerging picture is (...)
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  9.  91
    Gettier and the a priori.Philipp Berghofer - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):93-101.
    In 1967, Alvin Goldman prominently claimed that the traditional JTB analysis is adequate for non-empirical knowledge. Since then, this claim has remained widely unchallenged. In this paper, I show that this claim is false. I provide two examples in which a true belief is a priori justified but epistemically defective such that it does not constitute knowledge. Finally, I submit a novel analysis of a priori knowledge that avoids the Gettier problem. What is particularly important and distinctive about my analysis (...)
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  10.  48
    Repugnance at the limit.Susumu Cato, Ko Harada & Ken Oshitani - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):231-240.
    The implications of the repugnant conclusion for consequentialist theories, such as total utilitarianism, have been extensively discussed since the work of Derek Parfit. These discussions make the paradoxes of population ethics depend on welfarist conditions, like the dominance condition (or the Pareto Principle). Thus, one might think that the repugnant conclusion is not a practical problem for deontologists, who deny that we always ought to do what produces the most aggregate welfare. In this study, we offer two impossibility results using (...)
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  11.  34
    Corruptio boni: An alternative to the privation theory of evil.Christophe de Ray - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):191-203.
    The classic ‘privation theory’ of evil defines evil as an absence (or ‘privation’) of a good that ought to obtain. Despite its historical importance, privation theory is faced with a number of serious difficulties. I outline two of these difficulties and argue that they continue to pose a threat. I then present ‘corruption theory’, an alternative theory of evil reconstructed from some of Augustine's writings on the subject. I argue that this theory shares the strengths of privation theory, while evading (...)
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  12.  41
    ‘I don't know my way about’: Mirror reversal as a curiously instructive analogue of philosophical perplexity.Andrew English - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):215-230.
    Wittgenstein said in the Investigations, ‘A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about”’ (§ 123). The problem of mirror reversal—specifically the twentieth-century transatlantic controversy between the psychologist Richard Gregory, the mathematical columnist Martin Gardner, the physicist Richard Feynman and various analytic philosophers, including David Pears, Ned Block and Don Locke—is presented here as an instructive case of our not knowing our way about. ‘Why do mirrors reverse left and right but not up and down?’ We discover (...)
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  13.  68
    Relaxed realism, robust realism, and the truthmaker challenge.Paiman Karimi - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):134-144.
    Relaxed realist theories are becoming more common in metanormative theory. They want the advantages of robust forms of realism but without their metaphysical underpinnings. However, it is not always clear how we should understand relaxed realist theories in general. In this paper I clarify and defend relaxed realism. First, I characterise and distinguish relaxed realist theories from robust realist theories. Second, I defend relaxed realism against a challenge from truthmaker theory.
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  14. What is narrativity?Nazim Keven - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):204-214.
    In recent years, narrative accounts of the self have gained increasing attention. It is widely accepted that humans are storytelling creatures, that stories shape our self-conception, and that we fail to be agents without a narrative framework. While there is less agreement on what constitutes a narrative, it is generally understood to be more than a chronological listing of life events; it is also an account of the explanatory relationships among these events—a story of how events lead to other events. (...)
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  15. Knowability paradox, decidability solution?William Bondi Knowles - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):102-111.
    Fitch's knowability paradox shows that for each unknown truth there is also an unknowable truth, a result which has been thought both odd in itself and at odds with views which impose epistemic constraints on truth and/or meaningfulness. Here a solution is considered which has received little attention in the debate but which carries prima facie plausibility. The decidability solution is to accept that Fitch sentences are unknowably true but deny the significance of this on the grounds that Fitch sentences (...)
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  16.  20
    Lesser transgressions and loss of standing to blame.Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):241-252.
    In the Standard View, a blamee can dismiss another's blaming of her as hypocritical and thus standingless if, and only if, the blamer's violations of the norm he is invoking are as bad as the blamee's. I defend a counterexample to this view showing that blame can be hypocritical and thus standingless when, simultaneously with blaming, the blamer willingly violates, in a minor way, the norm he is invoking. If correct, this has important implications for accounts of what makes hypocritical (...)
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  17. Relational properties: Definition, reduction, and states of affairs.Bo R. Meinertsen - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):178-190.
    This paper defines relational properties and argues for their reducibility in a, broadly speaking, Armstrongian framework of state of affairs ontology and truthmaking. While Armstrong’s own characterisation and reduction of them arguably is the best one available in the literature of this framework, it suffers from two main problems. As will be shown, it neither defines relational properties very clearly (if at all), nor provides an adequate conception of their reduction. This paper attempts to remedy this situation in four steps. (...)
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  18.  24
    Knowing with.Heather Rabenberg - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):112-122.
    In this paper, I argue that there are irreducibly social epistemic values alongside more traditional epistemic values such as knowledge and true belief. In particular, I argue that what I call “epistemic convergence” is one such value, and that it can help us explain the badness of social epistemic pathologies, such as testimonial injustice and epistemic bubbles.
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  19.  31
    Recalcitrant emotions: The problems of perceptual theories.Giulio Sacco - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):156-167.
    The term ‘recalcitrant emotions’ refers to those cases where we feel an emotion that apparently contradicts our better judgements. For instance, one may be afraid of flying while claiming not to believe that it is dangerous. This phenomenon is commonly conceived as an objection to cognitivism, according to which emotions are based on the subject's beliefs, insofar as it would force us to ascribe to the subject who feels them an excessive degree of irrationality, comparing recalcitrant emotions to contradictory beliefs. (...)
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  20.  29
    Dualism about undercutting defeat.Marco Tiozzo - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):145-155.
    Most philosophers agree that the distinction between rebutting and undercutting defeaters is sound. Recently, however, there has been much debate over the nature of and relationship between rebutting and undercutting defeaters. Among the things that have been argued about is whether undercutting defeat, in contrast to rebutting defeat, require higher-order commitment, i.e., a belief regarding the link between the source of justification and the target proposition. This paper examines the debate and argues that whether or not undercutting defeaters require higher-order (...)
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  21.  36
    The perceptual model: Emotions as possessed reasons.Hamid Vahid - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):168-177.
    Emotions play vital roles in our psychology and our lives. They also often form the basis of our evaluative beliefs. On some views, emotions, like perceptions, justify the beliefs to which they give rise. It has, however, been claimed that, unlike perceptions, emotions are merely proxies for the genuine reasons that are constituted by their cognitive bases. In this paper, I argue that this objection arises from the failure to notice the difference between the notions of ‘reasons there are’ and (...)
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  22.  20
    The limits of compromise.Fabian Wendt - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):253-263.
    This paper defends the view that the limits of compromise are identical with the moral principles that set limits to human action more generally. Moral principles that prohibit lying, stealing, or killing, for example, sometimes make it morally impermissible to accept a compromise proposal, for the simple reason that the proposal involves an act of lying, killing, or stealing. The same holds for any other moral principle that sets limits to human action. This may sound straightforward and, perhaps, trivial. Yet (...)
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  23.  22
    The science of virtue: A framework for research By Blaine J. Fowers, Nathan D. Leonhardt, & Bradford Cokelet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2024. pp. vii + 394. $39.99 (pbk). ISBN : 9781108779968. [REVIEW]Kaj André Zeller & Berker Bahçeci - 2024 - Ratio 37 (2-3):264-268.
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  24.  23
    From individual to general experience.Anja Berninger - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):38-50.
    There has been some debate recently about whether we can come to know what an experience is like that we have not been through ourselves. Mostly, this debate focuses on general phenomenal knowledge. It is asked, for instance, whether we can come to know what it is like to be a refugee generally speaking (as opposed to being some specific refugee). In this paper, I want to add to this debate by trying to come to know how and to what (...)
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  25. The limits of the just-too-different argument.Ragnar Francén & Victor Moberger - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):64-75.
    According to moral non-naturalism, the kind of genuine or robust normativity that is characteristic of moral requirements cannot be accounted for within a wholly naturalistic worldview, but requires us to posit a domain of non-natural properties and facts. The main argument for this core non-naturalist claim appeals to what David Enoch calls the 'just-too-different intuition'. According to Enoch, robust normativity cannot be natural, since it is just too different from anything natural. Derek Parfit makes essentially the same claim under the (...)
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  26.  84
    Delineating beauty: On form and the boundaries of the aesthetic.Panos Paris - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):76-87.
    Philosophical aesthetics has recently been expanding its purview—with exciting work on everyday aesthetics, somaesthetics, gustatory aesthetics, and the aesthetics of imperceptibilia like mathematics and human character—reclaiming territory that was lost during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the discipline begun concentrating almost exclusively on the philosophy of art and restricted the aesthetic realm to the distally perceptible. Yet there remains considerable reluctance towards acknowledging the aesthetic character of many of these objects. This raises an important question—partly made salient again by (...)
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  27. Deflating the hard problem of consciousness by multiplying explanatory gaps.Işık Sarıhan - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):1-13.
    Recent philosophy has seen a resurgence of the realist view of sensible qualities such as colour. The view holds that experienced qualities are properties of the objects in the physical environment, not mentally instantiated properties like qualia or merely intentional, illusory ones. Some suggest that this move rids us of the explanatory gap between physical properties and the qualitative features of consciousness. Others say it just relocates the problem of qualities to physical objects in the environment, given that such qualities (...)
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  28. Kant and the king: Lying promises, conventional implicature, and hypocrisy.Roy Sorensen & Ian Proops - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):51-63.
    Immanuel Kant promised, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’, to abstain from all public lectures about religion. All past commentators agree this phrase permitted Kant to return to the topic after the King died. But it is not part of the ‘at-issue content’. Consequently, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’ is no more an escape clause than the corresponding phrase in ‘I guarantee, as your devoted fan, that these guitar strings will not break’. Just as the guarantee stands regardless of whether the (...)
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  29.  22
    The trolley problemBy Hallvard Lillehammer (Ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2023. ix + 267 pp. £74.99 (hb)/£26.99 (pb) ISBN: 9781009255592. [REVIEW]Sara van Goozen - 2024 - Ratio 37 (1):88-91.
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  30. Organisational teleology 2.0: Grounding biological purposiveness in regulatory control.Leonardo Bich - 2024 - Ratio (4):327-340.
    This paper critically revises the organisational account of teleology, which argues that living systems are first and foremost oriented towards a goal: maintaining their own conditions of existence. It points out some limitations of this account, mainly in the capability to account for the richness and complexity of biological systems and their purposeful behaviours. It identifies the reason of these limitations in the theoretical grounding of this account, specifically in the too narrow notion of closure of constraints, focused on self-production. (...)
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  31.  82
    The significance of skepticism.Taylor Madigan - 2024 - Ratio (1):26-37.
    There is a recurrent sort of skeptical character in philosophical debates who believes that some social practice must be abolished because it involves a false presupposition about how things ‘really’ are. I examine this style of skeptical argument, using the moral responsibility skeptic as my main illustration. I excavate two unstated and un-argued for premises that it requires (which I call Undistorted Truth and Privileged Conception). This exposes the full extent of the argumentative burdens that such a skeptic must discharge. (...)
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