Alexander Pruss's Blog

Here’s a way to think about presentism. We have a three-dimensional reality and temporal modal operators, such as Prior’s P , F , H and G ...

Suppose human beings are deterministic systems. Then quite likely there are many cases where the complex play of associations combined with...

Here is an interesting special case of Ockham’s Razor: If we find that of nomic necessity whenever A occurs, so does B , then it is reaso...

Suppose determinism and compatibilism are true. Imagine that a clever alien crafted a human embryo and the conditions on earth so as to prod...

Suppose that determinism is true and Alice is about to roll a twenty-sided die to determine which of twenty innocent prisoners to murder. Th...

Consider the Causal Simultaneity Thesis (CST) that all causation is simultaneous. Assume that simultaneity is absolute (rather than relative...

Occasionally, people have thought that one can refute determinism as follows: If determinism is true, then all our thinking is determined....

If at most one action is possible for one, that action is not supererogatory. If determinism is true, then there is never more than one ac...

Consider these two stories: Alice grew up in a terrible home. Her mother abused her. Her father taught her by word and deed that morality ...

Discussion of my previous post has made me realize that, it seems, we’re more apt to be skeptical about the culpability of someone whose ev...

I will run an argument against the thesis that facts about the past are grounded in the present on the basis of the intuition that that woul...

Suppose soft determinism is true: the world is deterministic and yet we are responsible for our actions. Now imagine a device that can be a...

I made a simple cellular automaton snowflake generator in OpenSCAD. By default it uses Stephen Wolfram's rule that a hex cell stays ali...

Suppose that I am throwing a perfectly sharp dart uniformly randomly at a continuous target. The chance that I will hit the center is zero. ...

Consider this naive argument: If the desire-belief theory of motivation is true, whenever I act, I do what I want. Sometimes in acting I ...

All analogue devices jitter on a small time-scale. The jitter is for all practical purposes random, even if the system is deterministic. Su...

Bohm’s interpretation of quantum mechanics has two ontological components: It has the guiding wave—the wavefunction—which dynamically evolve...

One can always take an indeterministic theory and turn it deterministic in some way or other while preserving empirical predictions. Bohmian...

If determinism is true, then I always do the best I can do. If I always do the best I can do, I lack moral imperfection. So if determinism i...

If determinism were true, then since each state could be project from the initial state, we could simply suppose that the whole four-dimensi...