Alexander Pruss's Blog

On desire-fulfillment (DF) theories of wellbeing, cases of fulfilled desire are an increment to utility. What about cases of unfulfilled des...

Suppose Alice is blind to the intrinsic value of friendship and Bob can see the intrinsic value of friendship. Bob then told Alice that frie...

Empathy is usually understood as sharing in the feelings of others, and it is thought to be an important part of closer forms of human love....

Suppose something bad happens to my friend, and while I am properly motivated in the right degree to alleviate the bad, I just don’t feel b...

We are said to have various obligations, especially of benevolence, to our friends precisely because they are our friends. Yet this seems mi...

Among other things, I am a mathematician and a Wacoan. It is moderately important to my self-image, my “identity”, that I practice mathemati...

Plausibly, having satisfied desires contributes to my well-being and having unsatisfied desires contributes to my ill-being, at least in the...

Some kinds of roles succeed in imposing norms on those in roles of that kind. For instance, friends should help each other because they are ...

I have the good of friendship with Trent. Suppose Trent was my only friend. Then I would be getting two good things out of my friendship: ha...

When Jesus said to love one's neighbor, he was asked who was one's neighbor. When he said to love one's enemy, he wasn't ask...

I just unfriended my remaining three Facebook friends. If you were one of them, please take no offense. Facebook friendship isn't friend...

Internalism about truth holds that a belief's being true is a function of things internal to the mind of the believer. Coherentis...

Love contains three aspects: appreciation, benevolence and a striving for union. Suppose that we are supposed to love all human b...

Thesis 1: There is no special form of love that falls under the label "friendly love" or "the love characteristic of f...

I just finished watching My Best Friend while running on the treadmill. I really liked it. It's like a romantic comedy, but ...

Hypothesis: A society where romantic relationships and marriages are seen as primarily about emotional union between two adults i...

I found Frank Beckwith's new book, Return to Rome: Confessions of an Evangelical Catholic , a gift from Frank (thank you!). I...

According to Jennifer Whiting, our relation to our future selves is like that to our friends. But this view is subject to a parti...

When one is not tired of a friend, the expected approaching loss of union with the friend makes one miserable. To be tired of a ...

You ask me: "Did Owen tell you in confidence that he is looking for another position?" He didn't, and in fact Owen ...