Alexander Pruss's Blog

A couple of days ago I blogged that van Inwagen is right that we should not expect an answer to the General Composition Question. Now I am...

Assume Molinism. Let maximal transworld depravity be the claim that for any circumstances C in which an agent x would be freely choosing b...

Given theism, I suspect there is no answer to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question, which asks for non-mereological necessary and suff...

I’ve for a while wondered if mereology can’t be nomically strongly emergent, namely whether there couldn’t be laws of nature of the form: ...

Here is an initially plausible idea: A promise can take an action that absent the promise is merely permissible and turn it into an action...

Consider one more pair of cases to challenge the standard view that there is no significant moral difference between withholding and withdra...

Consider two cases where a patient ended up with an implanted device D that benefits the patient by ameliorating an otherwise fatal medical...

Van Inwagen thinks that a plurality of x s composes something if and only if either there is only one thing among the x s or the x s have a ...

I have heard that there is a consensus on the equivalence of the actions of withholding medical treatment and withdrawing it, even when th...

That there is an entity that is 25 inches long in 1973 and 72 inches long in 1993 is not even partly grounded in facts about anybody’s memo...

Van Inwagen’s General Constitution Question (GCQ) is to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the x s to compose y in non-mereolo...

Question: Suppose Alice goes to hell, having conclusively rejected God’s grace. Given that God knew that Alice will reject his grace, why d...

Animalism holds that we are animals. This is a pretty common-sense view. We are clearly mammals, and mammals are animals. However, there is...

After Kripke, pretty much everyone nowadays accepts moderate mental externalism: the content of our thoughts depends on the extra-mental wor...

Suppose I am sluggish mentally in the morning and function fast mentally in the afternoons. I find myself in a dark room with no information...