Alexander Pruss's Blog

Animalism holds that we are animals. This is a pretty common-sense view. We are clearly mammals, and mammals are animals. However, there is...

I want to think a bit about conservative Christian views of sex and gender, but before that I want to offer two stories to motivate a crucia...

We have beliefs. A belief is a mental state with the proper function of reflecting reality. Our mental states are biological states. (Fol...

A standard Aristotelian principle says: No substance is a part of another substance. I was just struck by how (1) says less than it seem...

I think some Aristotelian philosophers are inclined to think that our nature is to be rational animals, so that all rational animals would b...

Aristotelians have a metaphysical ground for claims about what is normal and abnormal in an individual: the form of a substance grounds the ...

The collection  Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science  (eds: Simpson, Koons and Teh) is now available . It's divided i...

God is alive, angels are alive, people are alive, dogs are alive, worms are alive and trees are alive. What is it that makes them all be ali...

The biological understanding of male and female is something like this. Some species reproduce sexually. Some species that reproduce sexuall...

Accounts of biological life characterize it by lists of features such as “reproduction, metabolism, functional organization, growth, respons...

Squeeze your fingers around something hard. It feels like you’re making an effort with your fingers . But you’re making an effort with muscl...

I've been thinking that in a nutshell one could put much of the distinctiveness of Aristotelian philosophy as follows: life science is a...

One might with pull a small plant from one's garden with little thought. But one wouldn't do that to a full grown tree. Of course it...

Some of the cool animals in our local zoo are not part of the zoo. But the space they occupy is part of the zoo. Artifacts like zoos thus ...

I just had a really naive thought. Let's imagine what a definition of animals would be like. It would say something like this: Animals a...

All humans have dignity because they are humans. Humans do not have dignity because of an extrinsic property. So, being human isn't an e...

If one searches for "the greatest discovery in the history of biology", the top hits indicate that it was the discovery of DNA. Ma...

According to functionalism, a mental state such as a pain is characterized by its causal roles. But if one physical state plays t...

There are two major families of views on our relationship to the biological world. On animalism , we are animals of the species homo s...

I observe some ravens, and they are all black. This gives me good reason to think all ravens are black. This is an inductive inf...