Alexander Pruss's Blog

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...

In his First Way, Aquinas argues that as we trace back the sequence of movers from effect to cause, we get to a first unmoved mover, and thi...

There are three views about ultimate explanations of reality: Nihilism: There is no ultimate explanation of reality. Onticism: The ultima...

This seems a bit plausible: It is unjust to punish someone for a feature that is not intrinsic to them. If presentism is true, then havin...

In my family, when someone (including me) has a birthday, they choose a type of cake, and then I bake it, often with the help of one or more...

I find myself sometimes troubled by narrow moral distinctions in the Christian, and sometimes more specifically Catholic, tradition. Lying i...

I am an absolutist about lying: I think it’s always wrong to lie. But even if I were a permissivist about lying, I would think that there ar...

Let’s say I am eating a dish, say a soup, a salad or a sandwich. At some point there is half-eaten dish, and finally all that’s left are som...

On the growing block theory of time, if God is in time, God grows. God doesn’t grow. So, God is not time or the growing block theory is n...

This is probably the simplest argument for the timelessness of God, and somehow I’ve missed out on it in the past: God does not change. C...