Alexander Pruss's Blog

Van Inwagen distinguishes the General Composition Question: (GCQ) What are the nonmereological necessary and sufficient conditions for the...

Suppose mereological universalism is true, and that I make a pizza and an alien a long time ago in galaxy far, far away (or even in another ...

Some philosophers hold that all fundamental instances of causal relations are simultaneous. Many of these philosophers are Aristotelians, th...

Xenophanes famously lambasted Greek religion for its anthropomorphism: if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and pro...

Here are two theories of divine conservation, tendentiously labeled: Occasionalist conservation: That a creature that previously existed c...

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), every contingent fact has a sufficient reason. What does “sufficient” mean here? A na...

As a four-dimensionalist, I have been puzzled both by the arguments that divine conservation is necessary secure the persistence of substanc...

Imagine there is an infinite stack of cards labeled with the natural numbers (so each card has a different number, and every natural number ...

Occasionally, people have thought that one can refute determinism as follows: If determinism is true, then all our thinking is determined....

Epistemic value is the value of true belief and disvalue of false belief. Let p be the proposition that there is such a thing as epistemic...

I recently worked out the precise conditions under which one can have Popper functions, hyperreal probabilities or qualitative probabilitie...

In an old post , I observe the curious phenomenon that a typical attempted murder is not an attempt to murder and a typical attempted theft ...

I’ve argued somewhat as follows in the past: Necessarily, no one is responsible for a brute fact—an unexplained contingent fact. Necessa...

Aristotle says that a necessary accident of the human being is risability—the capability for laughter. As far as I can tell, necessary accid...

I am starting to think that one can lie without asserting a proposition. Let’s say that a counterintelligence agent tells an enemy spy that...