Alexander Pruss's Blog

The literature contains a number of examples of a modal claim that can be made with possible worlds language but not in box-diamond language...

Consider any game, like St Petersburg where the expected payoff is infinite but the prizes are guaranteed to be finite. For instance, a num...

I’ve been fond of the theory that materiality is just the occupation of space. But here is a problem for that view. I have argued previousl...

If we are animals, can we survive in a disembodied state, having lost all of our bodies, retaining only soul or form? Here is a standard th...

God is not a member of any natural kind. If person is a natural kind, then every person is a member of a natural kind. God is a person. ...

Consider this Thomistic-style doctrine: God’s believing that a contingent entity x exists is the cause of x ’s existing. Let B be God’...

Platonists hold that properties exist independently of their instances. Heavy-weight Platonists add the further thesis that the characteriza...

Do we live in a computer simulation? Here’s a quick and naive thought. We would expect most computer simulations to be of pretty poor quali...

Suppose that somewhere in the galaxy there is a planet where there are large six-legged animals with an inner supportive structure, that evo...

Suppose that out of a set of infinitely many people, including you, a finite subset is chosen at random. How likely are you to be in that su...

Here are two technical problems with consciousness causes collapse (ccc) interpretations of quantum mechanics. In both, suppose a quantum ex...

It initially seems to be a strange combination of views that (a) killing in defense of the innocent is sometimes permissible, but (b) lying ...

It is widely thought that our actions are governed by at least multiple types of normativity, including the moral, the prudential and the ep...

In case anybody is interested, I added a side-bar link to my old posts on the now-defunct Right Reason blog, from about a decade ago. I thi...

I will argue that lying is never permissible. The argument is a curious argument, maybe Kantian in flavor, which attempts to establish the c...