Alexander Pruss's Blog

Aquinas’s account of location for material substance is as follows. Ordinary material substances have a special accident—one more fundamenta...

One of the philosophical challenges of Aquinas’ account of transsubstantiation is his insistence that the bread and wine are not merely anni...

Jesus Christ like all human beings has an internal clock. One can measure that clock in heartbeats or in lower level physical interactions o...

I just noticed that a talk I gave on the Eucharist is available on YouTube . And there is a convenient playlist of a number of talks I'...

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

Accidents are more intimately dependent on substance than substantial forms on matter. If (1) is true and God can make accidents survive w...

The Eucharist has the vertical dimension of our union with Christ and a horizontal dimension of our union with our fellow Christians. The do...

I gave a Thomistic Institute talk on the Real Presence today. Here are the slides and here is the audio. I am particularly pleased with my...

I’ve been thinking how much nicer Leibnizian idealism is than the Berkeleyan sort, because you get this nice dose of realism from unconsciou...

I’ve been fond of the theory that materiality is just the occupation of space. But here is a problem for that view. I have argued previousl...

The doctrines of incarnation, resurrection and real presence certainly require us to believe ordinary language existence claims about bodies...

If Catholic teaching on the Eucharist is true, then there is a time t such that an accident of bread exists-at- t and no substance of whic...

This is going to be very speculative, and I doubt it yields an orthodox account of transsubstantiation, but since there is some chance that ...

Thomas Aquinas's take on transsubstantiation supposes that the accidents of bread and wine can continue existing even after the bread an...

I will first argue that location is a multiply-realizable—i.e., functional—determinable. Then I will offer a sketch of what defines it...

Here's something I've been thinking about. I want to start with the technical notion of being located at a region. This noti...

There is more than one way of putting this point, so the assumptions I will make are not at all essential, and I don't even endorse the ...

There seems to be a difference between change and replacement. Sperm and egg unite, and are changed into a new organism. While t...