Alexander Pruss's Blog

Aquinas’s account of location for material substance is as follows. Ordinary material substances have a special accident—one more fundamenta...

Unless something like the Bohmian interpretation or a spatial collapse theory is right, quantum mechanics gives us good reason to think that...

Here’s a three-level determinable-determinate model of spacetime that seems somewhat attractive to me, particularly in a multiverse context....

A five kilogram object has the determinable mass with the determinate mass of 5 kg . The determinate mass of 5 kg is a property that is on...

According to relationalism, space is constituted by the network of spatial relations, such as metric distance relations (e.g., being seven m...

Think about other plausibly fundamental qualities beyond location and extension: thought, charge, mass, etc. For each one of these, there ar...

Here’s a fun thought experiment. By a miracle (say) I am sitting in my armchair in Waco but my causal interaction with my environment at the...

Multiverse theories like David Lewis’s or Donald Turner’s populate reality with a multitude of universes containing strange things like unic...

The following seems to be intuitively plausible: If an object is wholly located in a region R but is not wholly located in a subregion S , ...

If collapse versions of quantum mechanics are right, then objects typically don't have location simpliciter . Instead, they have a wavef...

The philosophical tradition contains two conceptions of matter. One kind, associated with Descartes, connects matter with space: matter is w...

According to substantivalism, spacetime or its points or regions is a substance, and location is a relation between material things and spac...

I've found the notion of a material object very puzzling. Here is something that would render it less puzzling to me: x is ...

I will first argue that location is a multiply-realizable—i.e., functional—determinable. Then I will offer a sketch of what defines it...

As David Lewis taught us, time travel calls for a notion of internal time. If I am about to travel to the time of the dinosaurs, then...

Here's something I've been thinking about. I want to start with the technical notion of being located at a region. This noti...

Once one has an adverbial ontology, like the one I used to help with the Incarnation, one no longer needs the parts of a substance i...

Functionalism about location holds that any sufficiently natural relation, say between objects and points in a topological space, that has ...

Consider a Newtonian physics with gravity and point particles with non-zero mass. Take component forces and masses as primitive quant...

That's my new slogan.  It's aimed at philosophical views on which there is something ontologically special about occupying a locatio...