Alexander Pruss's Blog

One of the philosophical challenges of Aquinas’ account of transsubstantiation is his insistence that the bread and wine are not merely anni...

Infamously, Aristotle thought that in animal reproduction (including the human case) the male contributed form and the female the matter. I...

Aristotle’s positing matter is driven by trying to respond to the Parmenidean idea that things can’t come from nothing, and hence we must po...

From purely geometrical facts , it follows that every spatially extended entity is arbitrarily small at its beginning and at its end in almo...

Here is a valid argument: Matter survives substantial change. It is not possible that there exist two substances of the same species with...

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

Accidents are more intimately dependent on substance than substantial forms on matter. If (1) is true and God can make accidents survive w...

Here's a theory: a material thing is something that has or is a causal power that is not a mental causal power. Variant: that is not a r...

A question I haven’t seen explored much by contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics is that of matter ill-suited to the form. Is it metaphy...

Roughly, Aquinas thinks of a substance as something that: is existentially independent of other things, and is complete in its nature. ...

Suppose that we are in an infinite Euclidean space, and that a rocket accelerates in such a way that in the first 30 minutes its speed doubl...

According to traditional Aristotelianism, what makes you and me be distinct entities is that although we are of the same species, we’re made...

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

Too much of the contemporary ontological imagination is guided by the idea that the fundamental physical stuff in the world is discrete part...

A standard Aristotelian principle says: No substance is a part of another substance. I was just struck by how (1) says less than it seem...

One of the main reasons I don’t believe in (complex) artifacts is that the existence of an artifact would have to depend on our intentions. ...

I’ve long been puzzled by materiality. Here’s a thought: What if materiality isn’t characterized by anything deeply metaphysical, but by a ...

The following seems to me to be a central tenet of classical Aristotelianism: The identity of a parcel of matter is grounded in form. Bu...

The two main parts of the doctrine of transubstantiation that get philosophically discussed are that after consecration we have: Real Presen...

The following argument is valid: It is metaphysically impossible for us to become wholly immaterial. If we are wholly material, then func...