Alexander Pruss's Blog

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

All facts completely reducible to physics are first-order facts. All facts completely explained by first-order facts are themselves comple...

For a while, I’ve been thinking of a teleological/normative account of representation. The basic idea is that: State S represents reality...

I’ve never been moved by Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism in general, but I’ve also always found it plausible that natur...

The crucial thought behind evolutionary accounts of proper function or teleology is that organisms succeed in reproducing because they are f...

Suppose that we lived lives like ours in a world (possible or not) whose metaphysics included nothing like moral duties except that there wa...

I have begun work with a working title of Norms, Natures and God , which should be a book on how positing Aristotelian natures solves proble...

Some people, most notably Robin Collins, have run teleological arguments from the discoverability of the laws of nature. But I doubt that w...

The most common kind of moral argument for theism is that theism better fits with there being moral truths (either moral truths in general, ...

A well-known problem, noticed by Meirav, is that it is difficult to distinguish hope from despair. Both the hoper and the despairer are unsu...

Tripping while walking or acquiring an unjustified belief does not entail that we are in any way defective. It’s just not in human nature to...

Suppose a very large group of people who form their scientific beliefs at random. And then aliens kill everybody whose scientific beliefs ar...

People intuitively know that stealing is wrong. Maybe stealing is wrong because it violates the social institution of property which is reas...

Some biological taxa are clades: a clade is a taxon that contains a descendant of every included organism. For instance Mammalia is a clade,...

Andrea Dworkin argued that sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is always wrong because it involves a violation of the woman's b...

A perfect Bayesian agent is really quite simple. It has a database of probability assignments, a utility function, an input system and an ou...

It has been argued that if we are the product of unguided evolution, we would not expect our moral sense to get the moral facts right. I thi...

I was thinking about the method of cases in ethics, and it made me think of what we do when we apply the method as a reverse engineering of ...

Suppose that God made physical stuff (say, particles) be arranged just like in a butterfly, but he did not give (either directly or by ...

This is an oldish argument, inspired by a student comment, but I kind of like my present formulation of it. Start with this fine ...