Alexander Pruss's Blog

One promising way to define priors is with algorithmic probability , such as Solomonoff priors. The idea is that we have a language L (say,...

Over the past two hundred years or so, one new tension point arose for the relationship between Christianity and science due to scientific p...

When you’re investigating reality as a scientist (and often as an ordinary person) you perform experiments. Epistemologists and philosophers...

We have an intuitive line as to where the suffering in animal’s life is so great compared to the goods in it that when we are able to do so,...

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

I think we learn at least as much about ourselves as persons from literature as from science. This is surprising if physicalism is true.

One of the most problematic aspects of some science practice is a cut-off, say at 95%, for the evidence-based confidence needed for publicat...

People sometimes use the progress of science to argue for physicalism about the mind. But it seems to me that Dostoevskii made more progress...

At times I am made uncomfortable by this objection to arguments for the existence of God: there feels like there is something fishy about in...

Our science developed over milennia, progressing from false theory to less false theory. Why did we not give up long ago? I take it this is ...

One way for physicalists to handle the apparent differences between mental and physical properties is to liken the difference to that betwee...

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

Van Fraassen thinks that when we accept a scientific theory, we should be bracket the theory’s claims about unobservable entities, but belie...

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...

Many philosophical discussions presuppose a picture of reality on which, fundamentally, there are objects which have properties and stand in...

There are two kinds of functionalism about the mind. One kind upholds the thesis that if two systems exhibit the same overall function, i....

One part of the problem of anomaly is this. If a well-established scientific theory seems to predict something contrary to what we observe, ...

The number of degrees of freedom in a system is the number of numerical parameters that need to be set to fully determine the system. Scient...

One often talks of the “uniformity of nature” in the context of the problem of induction: the striking and prima facie puzzling fact that t...