Alexander Pruss's Blog

According to Hume, for one to be responsible for an action, the action must flow from one’s character. But the actions that we praise people...

If God is closer to me than I am to myself, how can he be hidden from me? But don't I learn from Hume that my self is also hidden from ...

Hume argues against miracles by means of his balancing principle: (HBP) You should believe p on the basis of testimony only if p is at l...

The Hume-Edwards Principle (HEP) says: If you’ve explained every item in a collection, you’ve explained the whole collection of items. T...

Yesterday I realized something that should have been obvious: there are two separate interaction problems for dualism. Metaphysics: How do...

In one version of the Kalaam argument, Bill Craig argues against forming an infinite past by successive addition by asking something like t...

Let’s assume two theses: Humean view of causation. Mental causalism: mental activity requires some mental states to stand in causal relat...

The randomness objection to libertarian free will holds that undetermined choices will be random and hence unfree. Some randomness-based obj...

Consider this argument: Obviously necessarily, if N is a necessary being that exists, it is impossible that N doesn't exist. It is conc...

Suppose I am designing a simple vacuuming robot not unlike a Roomba, but a little more intelligent. I might set up the robot to have mu...

Consider Thomson's toggle lamp—each time the button is pressed, the lamp toggles between on and off—but suppose it existed fro...

According to best-systems accounts of laws, the laws are the theorems of the best system correctly describing our world. The best syste...

A plausible theory of desire is that x desires A if and only if x is disposed to pursue A (perhaps we should add "as suc...

The traditional Humean compatibilist position, prior to Frankfurt's examples, is that a deterministic agent who is free could still have...

I asked my six-year-old for an example of a bad reason for an action. Answer: "Someone wants to do it." A good reason...

According to some presentist theories of time, facts about the future are grounded in facts about the present and in the laws of ...

That's my new slogan.  It's aimed at philosophical views on which there is something ontologically special about occupying a locatio...

Justice demands a punishment proportionate to the gravity of the crimes. In particular, a greater punishment is called for for com...

1. Let's suppose for simplicity that miracles would violate of laws of nature. Consider then a "modernized" version ...

Is being dependent an intrinsic property of an entity? Suppose we say that it is intrinsic. Then we have the following interest...