Alexander Pruss's Blog

Maybe you have a cancer that would kill you in three months. So, get a powerful rocket. Accelerate close to the speed of light, and make a...

Here’s a valid argument: There is always an absolute fact about whether two conscious states are hosted simultaneously. If the mind is ph...

Consider this sequence of events: Tuesday: Alice’s memory is scanned and saved to a hard drive. Wednesday: Alice’s head is completely cru...

Suppose a woman crushes the head of a very long serpent. If the snake all dies instantly when its head is crushed, then in some reference fr...

Assume an Aristotelian account of substantial form on which forms are found in the informed things. A classic question is whether substantia...

Suppose that you very quickly crush the head of a very long stretched-out serpent. Specifically, suppose your crushing takes less time than ...

Some philosophers think that notwithstanding Special Relativity, there is a True Absolute Reference Frame. Suppose this is so. This referenc...

Many physicalists think that conscious states are partly constituted by historical features of the organism. For instance, they think that D...

Here is an unfortunate fact: The last minute of your life can consist of constant conscious pain. Of course, I think all pain is conscio...

Aquinas famously thinks that there is a succession of forms in utero , with first a vegetable form, then an animal form, and then a rational...

In a recent post I argued that in Aristotelian substantial change, given special relativity, the resultant substance starts as basically a ...

I have a counterintuitive view that our bodies can be extremely defective, to the point that we can exist with a body that’s just a couple o...

A common argument for the incompatibility of freedom and determinism goes something like this (where premises 1, 2 and 3 are implicitly assu...

Let’s assume: Faster-than-light travel is metaphysically possible in a special relativistic world. And let’s assume: In a special rela...

According to traditional Aristotelianism, what makes you and me be distinct entities is that although we are of the same species, we’re made...

Here is a very plausible thesis: Exactly one object is a primary bearer of my present mental states. This is a problem for the conjuncti...

Here is a standard story about Special Relativity and the A-theory of time: There is an objective metaphysical simultaneity, but this met...

Suppose two quantum systems, A and B , are perfectly entangled in such a way that for any measurement of one system, the other system must ...

It is known that perdurantists, who hold that objects persisting in time are made of infinitely thin temporal slices, have to deny that fund...

This morning I find myself feeling the force of presentism. I am finding it hard to see my four-dimensional worm theory as adequately explai...