Alexander Pruss's Blog

Here is a test case for explanationist stories about initial priors, on which a more explanatory theory has a higher initial prior. Consider...

We can think of the optimalist theory of ultimate explanation as the claim: Necessarily, that reality is for the best explains everything....

There are three views about ultimate explanations of reality: Nihilism: There is no ultimate explanation of reality. Onticism: The ultima...

Most people agree that one cannot have circularity in the order of explanation when one keeps the type of explanation fixed . Some like me t...

Most people agree that one cannot have circularity in the order of explanation when one keeps the type of explanation fixed , i.e., there ar...

I have a number of times over my career claimed that in the ordinary course of life, we don’t take seriously the hypothesis that something w...

Here is a dilemma for best-systems accounts of laws. Either: law-based scientific explanations invoke the lawlike generalization itself a...

There are three main views of laws: Humeanism: Laws are a summing up of the most important patterns in the arrangement of things in spacet...

Are the laws of nature hyperintensional? I.e., if p and q are logically equivalent, could it be that one of them is a law of nature and th...

I never seem to tire of this action-theoretic case. You need to send a nerve signal to your arm muscles because there is a machine that dete...

Any explanation for an event E that does not go all the way back to something self-explanatory is merely partial. A partial explanation i...

My usual story about how to reconcile libertarianism with the Principle of Sufficient Reason is that when we choose, we choose on the basis ...

In physics, we hope for the following unification: there is a small set of simple laws, and all the rest of physics derives logically from t...

The Hume-Edwards Principle (HEP) says: If you’ve explained every item in a collection, you’ve explained the whole collection of items. T...

At times I am made uncomfortable by this objection to arguments for the existence of God: there feels like there is something fishy about in...

I’ve argued somewhat as follows in the past: Necessarily, no one is responsible for a brute fact—an unexplained contingent fact. Necessa...

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) says that every contingent truth has an explanation. Most people who accept the PSR think it is a n...

Often in cosmological arguments the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is cleverly applied to vast propositions like the conjunction of al...

The phenomenon of contrastive explanations has been explored by a number of authors. There is another phenomenon in the vicinity, that of ex...

If an explanation is a truth or hypothesis that removes or would remove mystery from the proposition to be explained, then an antiexplanatio...