Alexander Pruss's Blog

I'm giving a Zoom talk against the privation theory of evil (with an alternative provided) for Liverpool University on Thursday at 9 am ...

Bob and Carl are drowning and you can save only one of them. Bob is a human being in the prime of life, physically and mentally healthy, hig...

I will be speaking online at the New Perspectives in Philosophy of Religion  conference tomorrow, July 21, 2021, at 3:00 pm Central Time (5 ...

The privation theory of evil says that: If E is an evil, then E is a lack of a due good. Here is a quick counterexample: Brutus's ...

According to Augustine’s privation theory of evil, evil has no positive reality, but is always a lack of something. It seems that theists ar...

It just hit me how puzzling Platonism is. There are infinitely many abstract objects. These objects are really real, and their existence see...

St. Augustine argued somewhat like thus: Everything that exists is sustained by God. God sustains only good. Thus everything that exists is ...

Presentists think that the past and future are unreal but the present is real. I was going to do a tongue-in-cheek post about an opposed...

It is an evil that we die. The badness of death is constituted by the cessation of the good of life. But not every cessation of ...

Fred is lost in the desert and dies. Without knowing this, Sally, his loving wife who is a presentist and thinks there is no afte...

Augustine raises this problem: What was God doing for the infinite amount of time prior to creation? Why didn't God create the wo...

Man consists of three letters. Man is a rational animal. Both (1) and (2) are perfectly fine sentences of spoken English, and ...

According to Augustine, a predication of an evil—say, the Sam is blind—is made true by a conjunction of two states of affairs. Th...

Just came across this in Augustine's The Teacher : Who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the ...

According to St. Augustine, an evil is a privation of a due good. This makes for an asymmetry between goods and evils: there are d...

Augustine says that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. This is a desire for God, but it is not at all explicit, whi...

The problem of evil that Augustine struggled with so mightily was neither the inductive problem of evil that so exercises contempo...

Both of the following claims are plausible to me but appear to be in tension: A full finite "Aristotelian" life of se...

Note: I am on a new faculty retreat until Friday. I will have no Internet access. My home server is going to automatically ma...

Suppose I have superhuman hearing. While you are listening to Beethoven's Ninth, I hear, with great precision, every single ...