Alexander Pruss's Blog

In the previous two posts ( here and here ) I offered interpretations or remixes of Aquinas’s Fourth and Fifth ways read as ways of showing...

Thomas writes : We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting ...

I’m playing with a reading—or perhaps remix—of Aquinas’ Fourth and Fifth Ways as giving a theistic solution to a problem that non-theistic A...

Peter van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question (GCQ), which is to give necessary and sufficient conditions for the claim t...

Intuitively: It is permissible to deliberately have children. But there is a powerful Kantian antinatalist argument against (1). To deci...

People often levy an arbitrariness objection against divine command theory: If God simply chooses what we ought, why did he choose to comm...

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...

It can be quite useful for someone suffering from a variety of brain conditions, such as obsessive compulsive disorder, to deliberately dist...

I’ve periodically wondered why doing poorly when faced with a Dutch Book is supposed to be a sign of irrationality, but it’s not a sign of i...

Here is a plausible thesis: Consciousness of one’s choice is necessary for moral responsibility. I go back and forth on (1). Here is a c...

Suppose a digital computer can have phenomenal states in virtue of its computational states. Now, in a digital computer, many possible physi...

Say that a functional property F is pain-like provided that a human is in pain if and only if the human has F . Assuming functionalism, t...

I am one of those people who do not have vivid memories of pains. Suppose I stub my toe. While the toe is hurting, I know what the toe’s hu...

The usual examples of a posteriori necessities are identities between kinds and objects under two descriptions, at least one of which invol...

Evidence E is misleading with regard to a hypothesis H provided that Bayesian update on E changes one’s credence in H in the direction o...