Alexander Pruss's Blog

There are three main views of laws: Humeanism: Laws are a summing up of the most important patterns in the arrangement of things in spacet...

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...

Of course not. But consider this. A negatively charged substance has the power to attract other substances to itslf . Its causal power thu...

There is something attractive about an ontology where all the properties are powers, but it seems objectionable. First, a power is partly d...

Tariq Nazeem emailed me a really cool and simple argument against certain kinds of gigantic multiverses. I’ve tweaked the argument a little,...

When I was in grad school, we were taught that one should abandon all hope of solving “in the right way” problems, such as the problem of ho...

Suppose I insisted that the Big Bang happened due to a cat generating an extremely high energy hairball. You would think I’m crazy. But why ...

Suppose neither Alice nor Bob has the power to budge the sofa, but together they can lift it. Causal powers belong to substances, and Alice ...

On a Humean metaphysics, energy conservation implies a vast conspiracy in the arrangement of things throughout spacetime, somewhat like this...

Molinists have the ability to give a distinctive pre-established harmony account of how the exceptionless truth of deterministic laws of nat...

The B -properties supervene on the A -properties provided that any two possible worlds with the same A -properties have the same B -properti...

Here is a plausible connection between normativity and causal powers: If x has a power to ϕ in C , and x is in C but does not ϕ , then...

After reading O’Connor and Churchill’s piece on emergence , one of my very smart undergraduate students commented that it follows from such ...

Analytic philosophers like to reduce. But not much work has been done on reduction of parthood. Here’s an attempt, no doubt a failure as mos...

A standard thing in the philosophy of science to say such stochastic explanation questions is that one can given an answer in terms of the o...

On my causal powers account of modality , p is possible provided that either p is true, or something has an n th order power to make p tr...

Consider William James' murderous mountaineer. His buddy is hanging on a rope that our antihero is holding, and our antihero decides to ...

I sometimes think that the phrase "causal power" doesn't quite convey what the causal powers theorist means or shoul...

I have defended at length the idea that metaphysical possibility is grounded in the causal powers of things. It just occurred to...