Alexander Pruss's Blog

On the mere difference view of disability, one isn’t worse off for being disabled as such , though one is worse off due to ableist arrangeme...

After visiting the British Museum yesterday, I find it rather hard to take seriously the argument for the relativity of beauty from the dive...

I am finding myself frustrated trying to figure out whether the fundamental bearers of aesthetic properties are mental states or things out ...

We have beautiful music at home on a hard drive. But wait: the arrangement of magnetic dipoles on a disc is not musically beautiful! So it s...

One sometimes hears claims like: There are things that can be conveyed through X (poetry, novels, film, art, music, etc.) that cannot be ...

My daughters and I saw a Makey-Makey banana piano at a local fair, and they thought it was cool. So I made an Arduino(clone) fruit piano, u...

Being largely tone-deaf, I don't appreciate music much at all. In fact, the older I get, the more music tends to annoy me, particularly ...

It seems that music is a sound, and sound is constituted by vibrations of a surrounding medium, i.e., typically air. But you can listen to a...

Every meaning derives from components to which intelligent beings have assigned a meaning. Some things that have a meaning tha...

I typically do not appreciate music at all. While there are rare exceptions, music typically leaves me aesthetically cold or anno...

My 6-year-old son and I built this copper pipe glockenspiel. Full build instructions with more photos are here.

I looked at my teaching evaluations from the fall.  There were some useful suggestions.  And one that was particularly amusing: background m...

Consider a naive relativist theory on which, necessarily, y  is beautiful to x  if and only if x  takes y  to be beautiful. This cannot...

I once ran a panel discussion between an Islamic theologian and a philosopher of art. The Islamic theologian was defending what s...

Suppose I have superhuman hearing. While you are listening to Beethoven's Ninth, I hear, with great precision, every single ...