Alexander Pruss's Blog

Markosian once proposed brutal composition as an answer to the question of when a (proper) plurality of objects composes a whole: compositi...

The view that all objects are either living or simple appears to be a consequence of van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition questio...

It would be appealing to be able to hold on to all of the following: Four-dimensionalism. Elementary particles are simples. There is onl...

Van Inwagen famously raised the Special Composition Question (SCQ): What is an informative criterion for when a proper plurality of objects ...

Some arguments against restricted composition—the view that some but not all pluralities compose a whole—are based on the idea that a featur...

Unger famously argues that he doesn’t exist, by claiming a contradiction between three claims (I am quoting (1) and (2) verbatim, but simpl...

A common-sense response to Eddington’s two table problem is that a table just is composed of molecules. This leads to difficult questions o...

Plural quantification is meant to be a logical way of avoiding some technical and/or conceptual difficulties with sets and second-order quan...

On the question of what has a substantial form, I have tended to think something similar to van Inwagen’s answer to the question of what w...

Some philosophers think identity over time is brute: diachronic identity facts are not further explained. Markosian proposed (though later r...

Van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question: (GCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the...

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question (GCQ), which is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the claim t...

Start with this plausible observation: Any part of me either is an accident of me or has an accident. For consider this: my corporeal pa...

Van Inwagen’s account of composition is that the x s compose a whole if and only if their activity constitutes a life. Here is a possibl...

If the x s compose y , then y cannot have caused all of the x s. I caused all my present cells. If presentism is true, then all my cells...

Van Inwagen holds that: All and only things whose activity constitutes a life (properly) compose a whole. Whether a plurality of things c...

One of the reasons to be suspicious of artifacts is that it seems magical to think we have the power to create a new object just by thinking...

It is hard to characterize an “informative characterization”. Here is an instructive illustration. Ned Markosian in his famous brutal compo...

Leibniz famously thinks that ordinary material objects like trees and cats have parts, and these parts have parts, and so on ad infinitum . ...

Robert Kane famously physicalistically grounds free will in quantum events in the brain. Free choice, on Kane’s view, is constituted by rati...