Alexander Pruss's Blog

Animalism holds that we are animals. This is a pretty common-sense view. We are clearly mammals, and mammals are animals. However, there is...

For a while this spring I’ve been thinking about ways of avoiding quaternity views of God. The problem is that, first, Father ≠ Son, Son ...

Let me re-phrase an argument from an earlier post . Suppose “=” is governed by the classical rules of identity, and G, F, S, and H are name...

I think the historical Aquinas’ solution to how God is one in three persons is a relative identity view that posits two kinds of identity: ...

One now-classic solution to some of the challenges of the doctrine of the Trinity is relative identity. On relative identity accounts of the...

In paradigm instances of parental action, my reason for action is the objective fact that I am a parent, not because of the subjective fact ...

Suppose Alice tells me: “My right hand is identical with the moon.” My first reaction will be to suppose that Alice is employing some sort ...

According to Aristotelianism, the distinctness of two items of the same species is grounded in the distinctness of their matter. This had be...

The only really plausible hope for a materialist theory of mind is functionalism. But the best theory of our identity, materialist or not, i...

Consider the popular concept of “identity”, in the sense of what one “identifies with/as”. Let’s call this “personal qualitative identity”. ...

On numerical-sameness-without-identity views, two entities that share their matter count as one when we are counting objects. Here is a cur...

Mike Rea’s numerical-sameness-without-identity solution to the problem of material constitution holds that the statue and the lump have nume...

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

Platonism would allow one to reduce the number of predicates to a single multigrade predicate Instantiates( x 1 , ...,  x n ,  p ), by intro...

Take a classic case of relative-identity. At time 1, we have a lump of clay, Lumpy1, that is formed into a statue of a horse, a statue I wil...

Advocates of relative identity say that identity is always relative to a kind. This seems to have an interesting and underappreciated conseq...

Suppose your cerebrum was removed from your skull and placed in a vat in such a way that its neural functioning continued. So the...

Consider this argument: It is possible for me to exist disembodied. It is not possible for an animal to exist disembodied. So, I am...

On psychological theories of personal identity, personal identity is constituted by diachronic psychological relations, such as me...

On the traditional understanding of Christ's Incarnation, Christ has two minds—a human mind and a divine mind—even though he is one ...