Alexander Pruss's Blog

As is usual, distinguish ontological parsimony, namely positing fewer beings, from ideological parsimony, namely positing fewer fundamental ...

There are different types of knowledge: mathematical, geological, biological, a priori , a posteriori , de se , interpersonal, hard-earned, ...

Everything that exists is intrinsically valuable. Shadows and holes are not intrinsically values. So, neither shadows nor holes exist.

When you’re investigating reality as a scientist (and often as an ordinary person) you perform experiments. Epistemologists and philosophers...

A typical Bayesian update gets one closer to the truth in some respects and further from the truth in other respects. For instance, suppose ...

In the Meno, we get a solution to the puzzle of why it is that virtue does not seem, as an empirical matter of fact, to be teachable. The so...

One can think of Everettian multiverse quantum mechanics as beginning by proposing two theses: The global wavefunction evolves according t...

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

Suppose P is a regular probability on (the powerset of) a finite space Ω representing my credences. A measurement M is a partition of Ω ...

Epistemology is heavily focused on the question of evaluating a doxastic state given a set of evidence: is the state rational or irrational,...

David Lewis’s notion of the naturalness of predicates may seem at first sight like just the thing to solve Goodman’s new puzzle of induction...

Normally, our overt behavior has the presumption of moral permissibility: an action is morally permissible unless there is some specific rea...

I wonder if a non-theist can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain. Start with functionalism. The precise functional sys...

Consider forty rational people each individually keeping track of the ethnicities and virtue/vice of the people they interact with and hear ...

It seems that every mathematical structure (there are some technicalities as to how to define it) could metaphysically be the correct descri...

It seems that every mathematical structure (there are some technicalities as to how to define it) could in fact be the correct description o...

I am impressed by the idea that other kinds of beings from humans can appropriately have different doxastic practices from ours, in light o...

I think I can give an example of something that has no reasonable (numerical) epistemic probability. Consider Goedel’s Axiom of Constructib...

The most common kind of moral argument for theism is that theism better fits with there being moral truths (either moral truths in general, ...

There is some pleasing initial symmetry between how a theist (or at least Jew, Christian or Muslim) can explain features of human nature by ...