Alexander Pruss's Blog

Philosophy Departments often try to attract undergraduates by telling them about instrumental benefits of philosophy classes: learning gener...

In the Republic , Plato says philosophy education shouldn’t start until age 30. I’ve long worried about Plato’s concern about providing youn...

I just came across this in Shturman and Tiktin’s delightful anthology of Soviet era jokes. (I don't know if it exists in translation.) ...

If we are created by a loving God, there is good reason to expect that what is good for us to believe—maybe even good for us as moral agents...

It is valuable, especially for philosophers, to learn languages in order to learn to see things from a different point of view, to think dif...

A lot of people identify as spiritual but not religious. It would be interesting to have statistics on how common this is among professional...

Suppose the minute of the greatest earthly pleasure you’ve ever tasted was repeated, over and over, for eternity, with your memory reset bef...

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A grad student was thinking that Platonism isn't dominant in philosophy, so I looked at the PhilPapers survey and indeed a plurality of...

Both philosophers and mathematicians attempt to give nontrivial necessary and sufficient conditions for various properties. But philoso...

Suppose someone proposes a philosophical account of the form: x is F if and only if x is G 1 and x is G 2 and x is G 3 . There ...

At times I am struck by just how little we know (and I don't even put much emphasis on the "know"). I work, inter alia , in p...

I have a new method for testing definitions. Read a definiens to someone, out of context, and ask her what she thinks the definiendum is....

Different genres of literature are apt to give insights in different areas of philosophy: science fiction: metaphysics and mind mystery:...

In the fall, I attended a really neat talk by Patrick Grim which reported on several computer simulation experiments by Grim. Su...

This morning, I had a look at a recent mathematics paper that I am a coauthor of. I was struck by how complex it is. The reasoning...

This is a follow-up on an earlier post . There should be a practical branch of human knowledge about how in fact to attain moral...

As readers of this blog know, I am not a big fan of the compartmentalization of knowledge, and specifically of a compertmentaliza...

There is a new, and promising, Catholic philosophy blog out there-- Philosophia Perennis . So far only one post, but they have multiple con...