Alexander Pruss's Blog

In my dissertation, I defended a causal power account of modality on which something is possible just in case either it’s actual or somethin...

The standard trolley case is where a trolley is heading to a track with five people, and you can redirect it to a track with one person. It ...

Suppose that Alice wishes to steal an item she can only take if Bob is dead. She plans to go to Bob’s house and ensure he is dead, by first ...

I never seem to tire of this action-theoretic case. You need to send a nerve signal to your arm muscles because there is a machine that dete...

 For a while I've wanted to have an arcade spinner for games like Tempest and Arkanoid. I made one with an Austria Microsystems hall-eff...

Some philosophers (Thomson and Rachels, for instance) think that intention does not affect the rightness or wrongness of an act. This view ...

Suppose that I am reliably informed that I am about to be cloned, with all my memories and personality. Tomorrow, I and my clone will both h...

Love (of the relevant sort) is appropriately only a relation towards a person. Someone appropriately has an unconditional love for another...

Human law is a blunt instrument. We often replace the thing that we actually care about by a proxy for it, because it makes the law easier t...

We normally think of approximation and imprecision as an unfortunate fact of our epistemic lives. But if the arguments of my previous two p...

Suppose a number Z is chosen uniformly randomly in (0, 1] (i.e., 0 is not allowed but 1 is) and an independent fair coin is flipped. Then ...

Some events have probability zero in classical probability. For instance, if you spin a continuous and fair spinner, the probability of its ...

Suppose I am considering two hypotheses, H 1 and H 2 , and according to H 2 there are more people. Does the fact that I exist give me reas...

A multiverse hypothesis that counters the fine-tuning argument posits laws of nature that vary across physical reality. A hypothesis that ...

Van Fraassen’s Reflection Principle (RP) says that if you are sure you will have a specific credence at a specific future time, you should h...