Alexander Pruss's Blog

In yesterday’s post , I discussed the Real Presence in the context of relativistic time. There, I made the assumption that when Christ is re...

Famously, Boethius says that an eternal being, unlike a merely temporally everlasting being, embraces all of its infinite life at once, “pos...

A number of people have told me that they have the intuition that a four-dimensional picture of reality like that in the B-theory undercuts ...

A number of contemporary Aristotelians hold to the view that when a fundamental particle becomes or ceases to be a part of an organism, the ...

An old idea in philosophy, going back to Plato, is that things that are becoming are less beings than things that are timeless. This is a m...

Spinning a rigid object cannot affect its shape. If four-dimensionalism is true, spinning a rigid object can affect its shape. So, four-d...

I have a weird view: when a dog or another substance ceases to exist, all its particles cease to exist, being replaced by new particles with...

The main problem the literature presents for eternalist theories is the problem of temporary intrinsics: how an object can have an intrinsic...

One of the main problems with perdurance is thought to be that it makes intrinsic properties be primarily properties of slices, and only der...

Here are some desiderata for a view of the persistence of objects: Ordinary objects can change with respect to intrinsic properties. Ordi...

It is known that perdurantists, who hold that objects persisting in time are made of infinitely thin temporal slices, have to deny that fund...

This morning I find myself feeling the force of presentism. I am finding it hard to see my four-dimensional worm theory as adequately explai...

Thesis: It is possible for an object to be acting while it does not exist. Argument: Imagine a rattlesnake that is ten light-years long, ...

It is possible to have a simple that exists at more than one time. Four-dimensionalism is true. So, temporally extended simples are possi...

This argument is valid: Some human mental events are fundamental. No human mental event happens in an instant. If presentism is true, ev...

I find very persuasive arguments like this: If theory T is true, then whether I exist now depends on some future events. Facts about wha...

No three-dimensionalist has this ludicrous picture of the human being: The human being is a three-dimensional whole whose functioning deri...

In normal situations, diachronic psychological connections and personal identity go together. A view introduced by Parfit is that when the t...

One of the main philosophical objections to dualist survivalism, the view that after death and prior to the resurrection we continue existin...

For the sake of this post, stipulate death to be permanent cessation of existence. Epicurus famously argues that death is not a harm to one,...