Alexander Pruss's Blog

Suppose I eat a chocolate bar and this causes me to have a trope of pleasure. Given assentiality of origins, if I had eaten a numerically di...

It is a commonplace that while Platonists need to posit a primitive instantiation relation for a tomato to stand in to the universal redness...

Taking the privation theory literally, evil is constituted by the non-existence of something that should exist. This leads to a lot of puzzl...

On abundant theories of properties (whether Platonic universals or tropes), for every predicate, or at least every predicate satisfied by so...

The main problem the literature presents for eternalist theories is the problem of temporary intrinsics: how an object can have an intrinsic...

It is difficult to hold (a) Aquinas’ idea that in transubstantiation the accidents of bread and wine continue existing after the bread and w...

Presentism says that only present things exist. This by itself cannot explain the nature of change. For assume an ontology on which, necess...

I will offer a bundle theory with one primitive symmetric relationship. Moreover, the primitive relationship is essential to pairs. I don’t ...

Suppose that x is F if and only if x has a trope of F ness as a part of it. Here is a cute little problem. Suppose Jim is hurting and ha...

A central Aristotelian insight is that substances exist in a primary way and other things—say, accidents—in a derivative way. This insight i...

Consider this plausible principle: x partially grounds y if and only if there are c s that fully ground y and x is one of the c s. B...

There are two kinds of trope theories: Those on which the tropes are parts of the particular object—call these “compositional” trope theori...

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

Standard perdurantism holds that we are four-dimensional worms made up of three-dimensional temporal parts. Many of the changing p...

Every thought is a trope of a thinker. There are thoughts. So, there are tropes.

Suppose that each cat has its own catness trope, each dog has its own dogness trope, and so on: each thing has its own essence tro...

This isn't meant to be a very good theory, but it's a start. The primitive notion I want to explicate is this notion of t...

Say that a proposition p is shifty provided that there are worlds w 1 and w 2 at which p holds, and a proposition q such that q...

I do not see any way to avoid the conclusion that the correct ontology includes more than just simple substances. This is depressing ...

Jerry waltzes. According to the Platonist, this means that Jerry instantiates the universal waltzing . So, where initially we though...