Alexander Pruss's Blog

A curious art form that blends nature with artifice is endemic in our culture, and likely a cultural universal. Many people modify their bod...

Waco riverwalk, Yashica 12, HPS5+

One occasionally wonders what theism adds to Natural Law ethics. Here is one example. Q1: Why are artistic endeavors good? Here, Natural...

I used to think that it’s quite possible that all our mental representations of the world are propositional in nature. To do that, I had to ...

In a number of cases of beauty, beauty is doubled up: there is the beauty in an abstract state of affairs and there is the beauty in that st...

There seem to be three senses in which beauty can be found in a piece of representational art: The piece represents something as beautiful...

I am finding myself frustrated trying to figure out whether the fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties are mental states or things out ...

One sometimes hears claims like: There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be ...

Some things, such as human life, love, the arts and humor, are very valuable. An interesting question to ask is why they are so valuable? ...

Consider something visually ugly, say one of my school painting projects. The colors are poorly chosen and the lines don’t do a good job rep...

My main academic task right now is revising my Infinity, Causation and Paradox book manuscript in light of referee comments. One of the tas...

Being largely tone-deaf, I don't appreciate music much at all. In fact, the older I get, the more music tends to annoy me, particularly ...

Consider these two candidates for fundamental physical equations: G =8π T G =(8+π) T . These two equations are equally simple. (The second...

You can appreciate Monet's Woman with a Parasol in person through your own unaided vision. But perhaps you need eyeglasses. If you use ...

Works of art are designed to be observed through a particular perceptual apparatus deployed in a particular way. A music CD may be shiny and...

Some films are evil . Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will , say. My interest in this post is not in such morally harmful films. Rather...

It's well-known that fractal-type objects can be quite lifelike and easy to generate. I've been scripting Minecraft with Python, in ...

It's a standard thought that art thrives on limitations. These may be imposed by the technical capacities of the medium (I was reading t...

As the length increases, the possibilities for good novels initially increase. It may not be possible to write a superb novel significantl...

There is a very large but probably finite number of possible images that the human eye can distinguish. Among these possible ima...