Alexander Pruss's Blog

Causal finitism is the doctrine that backwards infinite causal histories are impossible. If the x s compose y , then y cannot have cause...

If the x s compose y , then y cannot have caused all of the x s. I caused all my present cells. If presentism is true, then all my cells...

Efficient causes are explanatorily prior to their effects. Circularity of explanatory priority is impossible. I am the efficient cause of...

I can’t get myself to believe in a God who is an old bearded guy in the sky. That would be just a fairy tale. What’s wrong with such a conc...

Let’s suppose disease X if medically unchecked will kill 4.00% of the population, and there is one and only one intervention available: a c...

Here is an interesing exercise in decision theory. Suppose (as is basically the case for me, if one doesn’t count chocolates with alcohol o...

Suppose I observe some piece of evidence, attempt a Bayesian update of my credences, but make a mistake in my calculations and update incorr...

Earlier in the pandemic, I was very judgmental of students hanging around outside in groups and not respecting six-foot spacing. Fairly quic...

Suppose that Alice is a morally upright officer fighting against an unjust aggressor in a bloody war. The aggressor’s murderous acts include...

I just noticed that my talk "Regular Hyperreal and Qualitative Probabilities Invariant Under Symmetries" is up on YouTube. And the...

Some philosophers want to ground our duty to obey God’s commands in the need to show gratitude to God for all the goods God has done for us....

I’ve been thinking what an Aristotelian would say about the thesis that the normative supervenes on the non-normative. That thesis holds tha...

Roughly, Aquinas thinks of a substance as something that: is existentially independent of other things, and is complete in its nature. ...

Corruptionist Thomists think that after death and before the resurrection, our souls exist in a disembodied state and have mental states, bu...

From time to time I find myself musing whether Pascal’s Wager doesn’t simply completely destroy ordinary probabilistic decision theory. Cons...