Alexander Pruss's Blog

Entertain this thought: There is a unique last thought that anyone ever thinks and it’s not true. Or, more briefly: The last thought i...

Yesterday , I offered a paradox about possible thoughts and pluralities of worlds. The paradox depends on a kind of recombination principle ...

These premises are plausible if the quantifiers over possible thoughts are restricted to possible non-divine thoughts and the quantifiers ov...

A simplified version of Goedel’s first incompleteness theorem (it’s really just a special case of Tarski’s indefinability of truth) goes lik...

Say that a function P  :  F  → [0,1] where F is a σ -algebra of subsets of Ω is chanceable provided that it is metaphysically possible t...

Conglomerability says that if you have an event E and a partition { R i  :  i  ∈  I } of the probability space, then if P ( E ∣ R i ) ≥  λ...

The truthteller paradox is focused on the sentence: This sentence is true. There is no contradiction in taking (1) to be true, but neith...

Suppose there is an infinitely long line with equally-spaced positions numbered sequentially with the integers. At each position there is a ...

In the classic Thomson’s Lamp paradox, the lamp has a switch such that each time you press it, it toggles between on and off. The lamp start...

Let me take another look at the interpersonal moral Satan’s Apple , but start with a finite case. Consider a situation where a finite numb...

Consider a moral interpersonal version of Satan’s Apple : infinitely many people independently choose whether to give a yummy apple to a (di...

In the St Petersburg game, you toss a fair coin until you get heads. If it took you n tosses to get to heads, you get a utility of 2 n . Th...

Consider the Grim Reaper (GR) paradox. Fred’s alive at midnight. Only a GR can kill him. Each GR has an alarm with a wakeup time. When the a...

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...

This is a minor twist on the previous post . Magnetic core memory (long obsolete!) stored bits in the magnetization of tiny little rings. ...

Given what we have learned from science and philosophy, fundamental aspects of the world are mysterious and verge on contradiction: photons ...

Suppose Alice is an misanthropic immortal who lives in a universe of happy people. Suppose, too, that Alice is an immortal. Then one day Ali...

In strange physical circumstances, we would not be surprised by strange and unexpected behavior of a system governed by physical laws. Unde...

[This post works better if you have Javascript enabled.] The thesis that [thesis] has not received much of a defense [literature type] . B...

Suppose first a countably infinite line of blindfolded people standing on tiles numbered 0,1,2,…, with the ones on a tile whose number is di...