Alexander Pruss's Blog
A long walk
A theological argument that justified true belief is not knowledge
A two-sorted logic and the Trinity
Non-local real presence of Christ
Human ridiculousness
A counterexample to Weak Supplementation
The Trinity and classical identity, again
Transsubstantiation and the conversion of bread into Christ's body
A four-dimensional model of Eucharistic presence
The Real Presence and Relativity Theory
Gettiered by degrees
Action-guiding counterfactuals
More on wagers for the perfectly rational
Purgatory and its alternatives
Good's Theorem, perfect rationality, and conditioning on zero probability events
A nuanced compatibilism and the problem of heavenly freedom
Extending Good's Theorem to experiments and not just observations
Consciousness, fine-tuning and skepticism
Lifetime epistemic value
The epistemic value of experiments
Epistemic possibility and the Liar
A piece of Wordle prehistory
A method for living forever
A Christian argument against eternalism, with some remarks on "finite" and "infinite"
Anti-Lucretian preferences
Fear of death is not exactly fear of death or being dead
A problem with perfectly rational agents and decision theory
An argument from wonderful people
From the imago Dei to God
A double lottery and non-normalized probabilities
Predictability and epistemic utility
Life-time epistemic utility
Gender/sex minimization and Christian sexual ethics
Epistemic utilities and death
Forward-looking scoring rules
Aristotle on sexual reproduction
A really big choice
Little evils
Christ's concrete human nature
We should not make human-like AI
Rowe's argument from evil revisited
Aquinas on Incarnation as a rock or animal
AI and emotion
Metaethics and emotion
Mental properties and union dualism
Antinatalism and proxy consent
Virtue and tasks that I don't have to do
Corruptionism and time travel
Finetuning the multiverse
A new Thomistic view of the Trinity
Trinity, Quaternity and Naming God
A technical problem with brutal composition
The Sign of the Cross and the Trinity
The filioque
Paley's watch and a caveman
A variant of the preface paradox
A test case for explanationism
How has Aquinas not proved the Trinity?
Optimalism and mediocritism
More on strong open-mindedness
Algorithmic priors and human nature
Anselm and Brouwer
Does everything in time change?
Gale's criticism of Stump and Kretzmann's ET-simultaneity
Does it follow from van Inwagen's answer to the Special Composition Question that all complex things are alive?
Proper parts and dependence
How do we get to an unmoved mover?
An easily patched hole in the First Way
Explanatory principlism
Punishment and presentism
Old Polish Almond Torte
Fine moral distinctions
Permissivism about lying
Dishes of food
God and growing block
Divine timelessness
Semi-statistical views of health
Using general purpose LLMs to help with set theory questions
Plural quantification and the continuum hypothesis
Maybe we can create spacetime
Time without anything changing
The last thought
An improved paradox about thoughts and worlds
An improved version of the worlds, thoughts and pluralities paradox
Thoughts and pluralities of worlds: A paradox
Classical mereology and causal regresses
Persons and temporal parts
Imposing the duty of gratitude
Disbelief
Omniscience and vagueness
Desire, preference, and utilitarianism
Punishment and amnesia
Fine-tuning of both physical and bridge laws
Per se and per accidens multiplication of causes
Per se and per accidens ordered series
On Rasmussen and Bailey's "How to build a thought"
Omniscience, timelessness, and A-theory
A bit of finetuning
Towards a solution to the "God as author of evil" problem for the Thomistic model of meticulous providence
Perfect vision
An argument against the Thomistic primary/secondary causation account of strong providence
If no homotypic circles of explanation, no heterotypic ones either
Symmetric relations and logic
An argument for dualism from Special Relativity and unity of consciousness
Three fixity principles
God's forebeliefs are soft facts
Causal histories and freedom
Two decreases in tensions between faith and science
Divine attributes
Beyond metaphysical immutability
Could a being in time be eternal in Boethius' sense?
Towards quantifying the good of success
From three or four problems of omniscience down to one
Aquinas on God's knowledge of propositions
Freedom: a problem for presentism and growing block
The good of success is not at the time of success
More on A-theory and divine timelessness
Quantifying saving infinitely many lives
Permanence and meaning
Spatiality and temporality
Aristotle on flourishing
An argument for the three-species view
Divine timelessness and the A-theory of time
Probably most people you know are more social than you
Another infinite dice game
Theism and presentism
Growing Block and a time bias
Two kinds of time bias
What is real change?
A compositional fine-tuning argument
Avoiding temporal parts of elementary particles
Aristotelianism and fundamental particles
Beyond persons?
Two kinds of change
Mononoetism
Octopi, aliens, squirrels and AI
A Stoic thesis
Existing and existing at a time
Presentism and B-theory
Theism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmopsychism
Some odd theories of temporal reality, with eschatological applications
Presentism and the intrinsicness of past tensed properties
More on promulgation of laws
The command version of divine command theory
Lying and epistemic utility
Divine speech acts
Causation and the grounding problem for presentism
Nomically possible branches and open future views
Requests and obligations
Wolterstorff on worship and intention
Random causation across temporal gaps
Appearances of atemporality
Always-false open-futurism and the end of time
A Thomistic argument for the Principle of Proportional Causality
Divine willing
Why do we like being confident?
Observations and risk of confirmation/disconfirmation
Epistemic utilities and decision theories
"Swapping memories"
An instability in Newcomb one-boxing
Virtue and value