Alexander Pruss's Blog

One of the major themes in modern philosophy was concerns about the way that our contact with the world is mediated by our “ideas”. Thus, yo...

Here are two very common intuitions in the philosophy of mind: Our experiences of the same things are approximately qualitatively the same...

Here’s something odd in the knowledge argument as usually formulated. According to the knowledge argument, Mary who was raised in a black an...

In a recent post , I offered a non-causal dualist theory of sensory awareness on which when I see a red cube, there is a state r b of my br...

Consider the simple theory of visual sensation on which for me to have a visual sensation as of y is for x to stand in a “vision relation”...

I am now simultaneously aware of the motion of my fingers and of the text on the screen. Call this co-awareness. Co-awareness is not the sam...

On occasion, I’ve heard undergraduates suggest that naturalism faces a problem with emotions . They feel that a mere computational system wo...

There are books of weird mathematical things (e.g., functions with strange properties) to draw on for the sake of generating counterexamples...

In an old paper , I argued that we do not hallucinate impossibilia: if we perceive something, the thing we perceive is possible , even if it...

Suppose I say that Jim yelled in delight at 12:31. But in fact he did so at 12:32. Then I said something false but approximately true. Now,...

Consider something visually ugly, say one of my school painting projects. The colors are poorly chosen and the lines don’t do a good job rep...

We could imagine critters whose perceptual system works as follows: When they have an object in their visual field, instead of the perceptua...

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...

On a sunny day, I can see that the sun exists. If presentism is true, even on a sunny day I can't see that the sun exists. So presentism...

I've seen red. But as I am writing this sentence, I am not seeing red (my eyes are closed). So do I know what it's like to see red? ...

I have a strong theoretical commitment to: To feel pain is to perceive something as if it were bad. Veridical perception is non-instrumental...

Take seriously the Socratic idea that emotional awareness is a kind of perception of normative states of affairs: pain is a perception of ac...

On Friday I was feeling somewhat poorly and in the interests of public health (not that I minded!) I opted out of participation in the PhD g...

Last night, I took the big kids to the swimming pool.  When I entered the swimming pool area, I saw something that looked wavy and shimmery....

Leibniz tells us that bodies are phenomena. He also tells us that phenomena are modes of monads. Now, the modes of monads are appeti...