Alexander Pruss's Blog

When I give talks about the way modern science is based on beauty, I give the example of how everyone will think Newton’s Law of Gravitation...

Often, the kind of beauty that scientists, and especially physicists, look for in the equations that describe nature is taken to have simpli...

We like to say that Galileo was right that more massive objects don’t fall any faster than lighter ones, at least if we abstract away from f...

Here is an interesting fine-tuning issue, inspired by a talk I heard from Brian Cutter at the 2023 ACPA meeting. It seems likely that physi...

If a charged particle is an electromagnetic field, the field exerts a Lorentz force F  =  q E  +  q v  ×  B , where q and v are the charge...

Our physics is based on the real numbers. Physicists use the real numbers all over the place: quantum mechanics takes place in a complex Hil...

There is causation in the physical world. Causation is irreducible. Our fundamental physics does not use the concept of causation. So, o...

Assume the correct physics has precise particle positions (similar questions can be asked in other contexts, but the particle position conte...

Much (but not all) contemporary philosophy of mind is written as if microphysics were fundamental physics. But as far as I know, only on tho...

In a computer, we have multiple layers of abstraction. There is an underlying analog hardware level (which itself may be an approximation to...

The doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and transubstantiation initially seem contradictory. Elaborate theological/philosophical accou...

Suppose a rock is flying through the air northward, and God miraculously and instantaneously teleports the rock, without changing any of its...

Some people, most notably Robin Collins, have run teleological arguments from the discoverability of the laws of nature. But I doubt that w...

Here is a tension in the views of some theistic Aristotelian philosophers. On the one hand, we argue: The mathematical elegance and discov...

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

Here is an interesting question: How can one tell from a physics theory whether some event is physically possible according to that theory? ...

The collection  Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science  (eds: Simpson, Koons and Teh) is now available . It's divided i...

Assume a particle-based fundamental physics. Then the non-living things in the universe outnumber the living by many orders of magnitude. Bu...

I've been thinking that in a nutshell one could put much of the distinctiveness of Aristotelian philosophy as follows: life science is a...

The Axiom of Separation in Zermelo-Fraenkel (ZF) set theory implies that, roughly, for any set A and any unary predicate F ( x ), there is ...