Alexander Pruss's Blog

Assuming physicalism, plausibly there are a number of fairly natural physical properties that occur when and only when I am having a phenome...

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...

I’m getting convinced that pain, or even physical pain, is a category that does not cut nature at the joints. Consider that the taste of mou...

Here is a puzzling asymmetry. It seems that: Typically, we should seek to remove serious physical pains, even when these pains are normal ...

Say that a functional property F is pain-like provided that a human is in pain if and only if the human has F . Assuming functionalism, t...

Here is something everybody should agree on: there are no unfelt pains. The obviousness and clarity of this strongly suggests: Pain is t...

On reflection, my paradox of short pains can be simplified. Start with: Whether I have had a pain does not depend on the future. It is i...

Consider these two very plausible theses: Whether I have pain at time t does not depend on any future facts. There is a length of time δ...

Back in April , I suggested that there are two possible privation theories concerning evil: every evil is a privation for every evil, wh...

If suddenly everything in game and in my brain slowed down while I was having a good time playing Asteroids, my conscious sequence wouldn’t ...

A year of moderate pleasure is worth paying a second of intense pain for. An eternalist explains this in the obvious straightforward way: t...

The following six premises are logically incompatible: Pain is intrinsically bad. Pain is a quale. Qualia are real entities. All real e...

Let P be the pain center of the brain. Suppose you knew all of physical reality and nothing else. Then you would know that stimulating P ...

I wonder if a non-theist can be reasonably confident that non-human animals feel pain. Start with functionalism. The precise functional sys...

Assume vagueness is not epistemic. This seems a safe statement: If it is vaguely true that the world contains severe pain, then definitely...

This argument is sound. I am not sure if premise (2) is true, though. If God exists, then all fundamental entities are intrinsically good. P...

Supposing the growing block theory of time is correct and you have a choice between two options. You suffer 60 minutes of pain from 10:30 p...

In English, we have a category “pain” which we subdivide into the “physical” and the “psychological”. But this taxonomy is misleading. Cons...

Philosophers sometimes use thought experiments concerning the asymmetry of attitudes towards future and past events as arguments for a metap...

According to Augustine’s privation theory of evil, evil has no positive reality, but is always a lack of something. It seems that theists ar...