Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose we have an infinite regress of chickens and eggs, with no first item, and suppose that if there is any last item, it’s not a chicken...

Alice has lived forever in a universe with an infinite road that has a beginning and no end, and is marked every mile. Every day of her life...

Assume classical mereology with arbitrary fusions. Further assume two plausible theses: If each of the y s is caused by at least one of t...

Suppose infinitely many people independently roll a fair die. Before they get to see the result, they will need to guess whether the die sho...

Truth-value realism about (first-order) arithmetic is the thesis that for any first-order logic sentence in the language of arithmetic (i.e....

Suppose we have a backwards-infinite sequence of asexually reproducing chickens, ...,  c −3 ,  c −2 ,  c −1 ,  c 0 with c n having a chanc...

Say that a structure N that has a distinguished element 0, a unary function S , and binary operations + and ⋅ is a causal Robinson Arithme...

In my previous two posts I focused on the difficulty of God creating an infinite causal regress of indeterministic causes as part of an argu...

Suppose that a dod is a critter that chancily, with probability 1/2 , causes one offspring during its life. The lifespan of a dod is one yea...

Causal Finitism—the thesis that nothing can have an infinite causal history—implies that there is a first cause, and our best hypothesis for...

Imagine that Fred has all ten toes at 10 am, and there are infinitely many grim reapers. When a grim reaper wakes up, it looks at Fred, and ...

The main objection to the Grim Reaper paradox as an argument against infinite causal sequences is the Unsatisfiable Pair (UP) objection that...

As usual, Fred is alive at 10 am, and there is an infinite sequence of Grim Reapers, where the n th has an alarm set for 60/ n minutes afte...

By a finite alphabet encoding of a set X , such as the real numbers, I mean a one-to-one function ψ from X to countably infinite sequences...

In my previous post , I explored information processing finitism (IPF), the idea that nothing can essentially causally depend on an infinite...

When I was trying to work out my intuitions about causal paradoxes of infinity, which eventually led to my formulating the thesis of causal ...

I will give an argument for causal finitism from a premise I don’t accept: Necessary Arithmetical Alethic Incompleteness (NAAI): Necessari...

I have for a long time inclined towards ifthenism in mathematics: the idea that mathematics discovers truths of the form " If these ax...

It seems very plausible that for any specific Turing machine M there is a fact of the matter about whether M would halt. We can just imagi...

In a number of papers, I argued against using hyperreal-valued probabilities to account for zero probability but nonetheless possible events...