Alexander Pruss's Blog

Question: Suppose Alice goes to hell, having conclusively rejected God’s grace.

Animalism holds that we are animals.

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

Suppose I am sluggish mentally in the morning and function fast mentally in the afternoons.

Here is an initially plausible thesis about deliberation that I've long felt is right: Normally, when choosing between options, you are more likely to choose an option X than an option Y if and only if you prefer X to Y.

I wish one could formulate and defend a version of explanatory finitism, roughly saying that nothing has infinitely many explanations or an infinite chain of explanations, even if these explanations are not causal (causal finitism of course rules out the…

Suppose we have three landmarks at known locations in three dimensional space, not all on one line, and a camera that is not located at any landmark but sees all three landmarks, with known optical parameters such as focal length.

The Christian’s deepest desire is for direct union with God.

The Aristotelian account of individuation for beings in the same species proceeds by matter.

Some people are attracted to this idea: God gives infinitely many chances for everyone to be saved.

The standard Aristotelian story about individuation of finite substances is two-fold: What makes x and y distinct when x and y are members of different species is their difference in form What makes x and y distinct when x and y are members of the same sp…

Yesterday, I offered a Toy Model of how God could give infinite chances to someone and they could still reject him.

The biggest problem with Molinism is the grounding problem: there is nothing in reality wherein the subjunctive conditionals of free will (“middle truths”) could be grounded.

Let’s start with a line of thought that doesn’t require Molinism.

Consider an interesting pair of thesis.

Hedonic adaptation is the theory that individual humans have different basic levels of subjective life satisfaction (SLS).

Let strong physicalist supervenience (SPS) be the view that necessarily all truths supervene on first-order truth about the spatiotemporal arrangement of physical stuff.

Some years back I was searching for a better method to play lightgun games like Duck Hunt under emulation by using a Wii remote as a light gun.

Personhood is teleologically relational in the sense that a person is the kind of being that necessarily can only be fulfilled in relationships with other persons.

Consider this thesis, which both Augustine and Aquinas would accept: Value supervenes on being (VSB): How valuable reality is is determined by what entities exist.

In typical lab research ethics, the following types of ethical considerations count against an experiment: risks of harm to the world outside the lab risks of harm to persons in the lab risks of pain to conscious entities in the lab.