Alexander Pruss's Blog

A principle that both Catholic and Orthodox Christians appreciate is lex orandi, lex credendi : the law of prayer is the law of faith, Now ...

Suppose we model the Trinity as three vertices with arrows between them representing relations of procession, such that: No two vertices h...

I was teaching Paley, for the n th time, and it hit me to wonder how I would react to finding the watch if I was a caveman. There is one thi...

Imagine being given a list generated as follows, without being told how it was generated: A randomly chosen set of 2000 mutually consisten...

Here is a test case for explanationist stories about initial priors, on which a more explanatory theory has a higher initial prior. Consider...

St Thomas holds that we cannot know by natural reason that God is a Trinity. However, he also endorses a version of St Augustine’s account ...

We can think of the optimalist theory of ultimate explanation as the claim: Necessarily, that reality is for the best explains everything....

For the last couple of days I have been exploring what I like to call strongly open-minded accuracy scoring rules. It’s well known that ever...

One promising way to define priors is with algorithmic probability , such as Solomonoff priors. The idea is that we have a language L (say,...

I was reading Anselm’s replies to Gaunilo, and was struck by this: Furthermore: if it can be conceived at all, it must exist. For no one w...

Over the last two days, I’ve been thinking critically about Aquinas’ First Way. Central to my thinking, and especially yesterday’s post , wa...

Stump and Kretzmann give three main concepts of simultaneity in their famous paper : T-simultaneity between items in time E-simultaneity ...

The view that all objects are either living or simple appears to be a consequence of van Inwagen’s answer to the special composition questio...

Consider this initially plausible thesis: If x has a proper part, and all of x ’s proper parts depend on y , then x depends on y . Add...

I just realized that there is a difficulty in Aquinas’ First Way that I think hasn’t been noted, which builds on the difficulty noted yester...