Alexander Pruss's Blog

Consider this valid argument: Something that exists only for an instant cannot undergo real change. Something timeless cannot undergo rea...

Most philosophical discussions of natural kinds concern entities in the category of substance: particles, chemical substances, organisms, et...

This is an attempt to make an argument for the natural immortality of the soul from the premise that the soul has a proper operation that is...

When I think about McTaggart’s famous argument against the A-theory of time—the theory that it is an objective fact about the universe what ...

I’m thinking about the kinds of finitisms there are. Here are some: Ontic finitism: There can only be finitely many entities. Concrete fi...

In a recent post I argued that in Aristotelian substantial change, given special relativity, the resultant substance starts as basically a ...

According to Aristotelianism, the distinctness of two items of the same species is grounded in the distinctness of their matter. This had be...

I used to think that: x is a substance just in case  < x exists > is not grounded in any fact about any other entity other than x...

On Thomistic accounts of transsubstantiation, the accidents of bread and wine continue to exist even when the substance no longer does (havi...

According to Spinoza, I am a mode and God is the only substance. But I am not directly a mode of God. I am a mode of a mode of a mode of … a...

Start with this plausible observation: Any part of me either is an accident of me or has an accident. For consider this: my corporeal pa...

People sometimes wonder, perhaps in connection with the problem of evil, whether there is in total more good than evil in the world. The con...

An old idea in philosophy, going back to Plato, is that things that are becoming are less beings than things that are timeless. This is a m...

Roughly, Aquinas thinks of a substance as something that: is existentially independent of other things, and is complete in its nature. ...

It would be nice to define the internal time of a substance in terms of the causal order of its accidents. For each mode (i.e., accident or...

Here is a quick and simple argument for the Aristotelian axiom that substances are not parts of substances. The parts of substances are at...

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

If we think parts are explanatorily prior to wholes, then gunky objects—objects which have parts but no smallest parts—involve a vicious exp...

A foundational commitment of Aristotelian philosophy is that all facts are grounded in what substances and features intrinsic to substances,...

A standard Aristotelian principle says: No substance is a part of another substance. I was just struck by how (1) says less than it seem...