Alexander Pruss's Blog

We hired Tim O'Connor starting Fall 2017. It's very exciting for metaphysics at Baylor.

Let’s assume two theses: Humean view of causation. Mental causalism: mental activity requires some mental states to stand in causal relat...

There’s a curious puzzle for the following conjunction of views: theism normative power account of promises. To introduce the puzzle, think...

I just realized something that probably was obvious to many people: the opposite of the pleasant isn’t the painful, but the unpleasant. Grea...

Consider Hirsch-type deflationary views on which many differences in ontology are simply verbal differences. A standard case is nihilism and...

There is an old joke: to find out if a computer is conscious, you program it to tell the truth, and you ask it if it is. The point behind th...

Let’s idealize the decision process into two stages: Intellectual: Figure out the degrees to which various options promote things that one...

I wanted to 3D print a ball with dimples like a golf ball, so I got to looking up how to evenly distribute points over the surface of a sphe...

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...

Suppose that we have a minor parking infraction that, in justice, deserves about a $40 fine. Let’s suppose the infraction is so clear when i...

Suppose that I have Alister, who is an identical twin of Bob, registered in my class. One day, Alister is not feeling well, but knowing abou...

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...

A spy's message to his handler about troop movements is intercepted. The message is then changed to carry the false information that the...

If there is no afterlife, then promoting justice sometimes requires acting unjustly. Promoting justice never requires acting unjustly. So...

Here’s a curious thing: an unchanging object can have one shape at one time and a different shape at a different time. Example 1: In the c...