Alexander Pruss's Blog

On psychological theories of personal identity, the diachronic identity of a person is defined in terms of psychological properties.

I suppose I think all substances have teleology.

A standard thing that theists have long said is that some difficult situations are “trials” where you have right and wrong options, and where you have an opportunity to grow closer to God through the right choice.

I think a thought.

I want to get at a certain difference between relations like love and hate, on the one hand, and relations like causation and parthood, on the other.

I have defended causal finitism at length, mainly (but not only) as a way of getting out of paradoxes.

Some people think that it’s way more obvious that a contingent thing that has a beginning has to have a cause than that a contingent that has no beginning has to have a case.

Jonathan Schaffer in his famous “Monism: The Priority of the Whole” paper assumes that priority relations are well-founded.

Among things that metaphysicians wonder about is the question of what things referred to in ordinary language exist: Are there tables, chairs, people, shadows, holes, rocks, particles, etc.?

Say that a total order is locally finite provided that between any two elements there are at most finitely many elements.

Compare two worlds: Evanescent World (EW): There is a rich three-dimensional reality that exists for only one moment of time.

Here’s a way that an atheist could undercut the consensus gentium argument (the argument for theism based on how much belief in God or gods there is in the world), building on my previous post.

An evolutionary debunking argument against theism can be employed defensively or offensively by an atheist.

There are Christians who believe in the existence of abstract objects, such as properties, that are neither grounded in God’s mind (as on Augustine’s view) nor created by God.

As is usual, distinguish ontological parsimony, namely positing fewer beings, from ideological parsimony, namely positing fewer fundamental undefined concepts.

Four-dimensional mereological universalism has been proposed as a way of letting ordinary objects into our ontology.

If pansychism is true, all organisms are always conscious.

Here’s an argument for non-materialism about all organisms.

I’ve long wondered what it means to say that a bunch of things are “irreducibly jointly producing an effect.”

Van Inwagen thinks that the very same particles cannot have their activities constitute two life events.

Donald Williams in his famous “The Myth of Passage” argued that time cannot flow, because if it did, then it would require either a meta-time to flow in or would flow at a rate of 1 (i.e., one second per second = one hour per hour = etc.)

Many people when occurrently remembering what a tomato looks like have a mental image, with a degree of vividness and precision differing from person to person, of a red round thing.

Here’s a speculative theory of persons: A person is an individual of a sort that pursues the good as such.

Let’s assume causal finitism is false, and that the past can be infinite.

A correspondent asked me why not to simply believe in a restricted Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) that says that everything contingent that has a beginning in time has an explanation.

Suppose an amoeba biologically symmetrically splits into two cells, A and B.

Sider suggests this four-dimensionalist characterization of “temporary parthood” in terms of temporal parts: Necessarily, x is part of y at t iff x and y each exist at t, and x’s temporal part at t is part of y’s temporal part at t.

Here’s a fun argument: We are responsible for something.

Assume four dimensional unrestricted composition (or mereological universalism).

Causal finitism says that every item has a finite causal history.

How many objects exist at t is not even partly grounded in facts about how things are at times later than t in worlds without backwards causation.

This is another technical research note.

Some of my posts are basically research notes to self, stored publicly.

Suppose I make a drawing on a one inch square of transparency, and then project it to cover one side of an 40 foot cubical building.

Suppose I find on the ground a thin layer of sand.

Here’s one version of the axiom of choice for pluralities in terms of superplurals: AC(plural,superplurals): For a superplurality xxx of disjoint pluralities, there is a plurality zz that contains exactly one item from each plurality yy in xxx.

I’m playing with an alternative way to run the Meyer cosmological argument (with slightly weaker assumptions).

Suppose Bob offers a cookie to Alice who is free to accept or reject it.

Assume Molinism.

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

Assume Molinism.

Given theism, I suspect there is no answer to van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question, which asks for non-mereological necessary and sufficient conditions for a plurality of things to compose a whole.

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: If the xs satisfy F, then the xs cause there to be a y composed of the xs.

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 that is obligatory, but it cannot take an action that absent the promise is impermissible 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 withdrawing treatment.

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

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

I have heard that there is a consensus on the equivalence of the actions of withholding medical treatment and withdrawing it, even when the withdrawal requires a positive action from the medical professional (e.g., disconnecting a machine).

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 memory.

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