Alexander Pruss's Blog

• Aristotelianism and fundamental particles 2025-10-10
  A number of contemporary Aristotelians hold to the view that when a fundamental particle becomes or ceases to be a part of an organism, the particle perishes and is replaced by another. The reasoning is that the identity of parts comes from the whole substance, so parts are tied to their substances. I’ve long inclined […]
• Beyond persons? 2025-10-09
  I wonder if creation includes beings that are qualitatively as high above mere persons like us as mere persons are qualitatively above non-persons. Persons have agency and intellectuality (let’s say) and that gives them a dignity above non-persons. Is there some quality Q that is even more impressive than agency and intellectuality and that is […]
• Two kinds of change 2025-10-08
  I ran across this old post of mine and it made me think that there is an interesting distinction between two kinds of change which one might label as objectual and factual change. Objectual change is change in objects, including both an object’s acquiring or losing properties and an object’s coming or ceasing to be. […]
• Mononoetism 2025-10-07
  Every so often I come against someone who is defending a Christological view I want to call “mononoetism”: that Christ has only one mind. While the Third Council of Constantinople condemned the errors that Christ has only one will (monothelitism) or only one natural operation (monoenergism), I do not know of any conciliar condemnation of […]
• Octopuses, aliens, squirrels and AI 2025-10-07
  I’ve been toying with an argument for dualism along these lines: Octopuses are conscious. Technologically advanced aliens are or would be conscious. Squirrels are conscious. Current LLMs are not conscious. Claims 1–3 require a pretty strong multiple realizability. On materialism, our best such multiple realizability is a functionalism. But it is likely that our current […]
• A Stoic thesis 2025-10-02
  Combine these two rather Stoic theses: No one can make the fully virtuous person worse off Doing what is morally wrong always makes you worse off and you get: No one can make the fully virtuous person do what is morally wrong. It is going to be crucial to this post that (3) includes cases […]
• Existing and existing at a time 2025-10-01
  If we accept growing block or eternalism as our theory of temporal reality, we have to make a distinction between existing simpliciter (i.e., being in the domain of unrestricted quantifiers) and existing-at-a-time (including tensed existence at the present). To exist at time t is not the same as its being the case at t that […]
• Presentism and B-theory 2025-10-01
  It’s common to say that presentism entails the A-theory. But that’s not so clear. Suppose that time can pass in the absence of change. Now imagine a world of with a beginning or an end of time, objects, but no change, no temporal parts, and no events except ones that last for all time. In […]
• Theism, pantheism, panentheism and cosmopsychism 2025-10-01
  If God didn’t create anything, pantheism (everything is God), panetheism (everything is in God or is God) and cosmopsychism (the whole of reality is conscious) would be true. And it’s possible for God not to create anything.
• Some odd theories of temporal reality, with eschatological applications 2025-10-01
  The three major theories of temporal reality are presentism (reality includes only the present), growing block (reality includes the present and past) and eternalism (reality includes past, present and future). A recent option that has been considered is thick presentism on which reality includes a short segment of time including the present. This lets one […]
• Presentism and the intrinsicness of past tensed properties 2025-10-01
  Many presentists think that objects have past-tensed properties. Thus an object that is now straight but was bent has the property of having been bent. (Some such presentists use these properties to ground facts about the past.) But assuming for simplicity that being bent is an intrinsic property, we can argue that having been bent […]
• More on promulgation of laws 2025-09-30
  Laws need to be promulgated to be valid. Why? A Thomistic story is that valid laws create genuine reasons to act, and reasons are the sort of thing that’s available to a reasonable person. So, the laws need to be practically available to reasonable governed persons. In particular, if everyone has forgot about a law, […]
• The command version of divine command theory 2025-09-29
  Suppose that morality is grounded in God’s commands. What are God’s commands? The most obvious idea would be that God’s commands are speech acts of command or legislation like: “Thou shalt not steal.” But this is implausible. For such speech acts to be binding, they must be promulgated. But where? If we take seriously that […]
• Lying and epistemic utility 2025-09-29
  Epistemic utility is the value of one’s beliefs or credences matching the truth. Suppose your and my credences differ. Then I am going to think that my credences better match the truth. This is automatic if I am measuring epistemic utilities using a proper scoring rule. But that means that benevolence with respect to epistemic […]
• Divine speech acts 2025-09-25
  Suppose random quantum processes result in deep marks on a stone that spell out: Thou shalt not eat goat. – God What would need to be true for it to be the case that God said (or wrote) that, thereby forbidding us to eat goat? I assume that God always cooperates with creaturely causation, so […]
• Causation and the grounding problem for presentism 2025-09-24
  The past-grounding problem for presentism is of explaining what grounds facts about the past. The tensed-property solution is that presently existing objects have past-tensed properties like “Existing a hundred million years after a dinosaur” which ground the facts about the past. Here is a problem. The presently existing objects exist at least partly because of […]
• Nomically possible branches and open future views 2025-09-23
  Some open future views rely on the concept of a nomically possible branch—a complete sequence of how things might go given the laws of nature. The problem with the concept is this. A nomically possible branch seems to be something like an exhaustive collection of propositions about all times, specifying precisely what happens at all […]
• Requests and obligations 2025-09-22
  By requesting something from someone, we create a reason for them to fulfill the request. On an individualistic view of human beings, this is a rather awesome power—somehow I reach into your space of reasons and create a new one. It is tempting to downplay the force of reasons created by a request. After all, […]
• Wolterstorff on worship and intention 2025-09-19
  In Acting Liturgically, Wolterstorff offers a necessary and sufficient condition for when someone “is performing acts of worship or just saying the words and making the gestures”: if a participant performs some prescribed verbal or gestural action with the intention of not thereby performing whatever be the act of worship prescribed to be performed thereby, […]
• Random causation across temporal gaps 2025-09-19
  Suppose that causation across temporal gaps is possible: that an object x can have a direct effect in a future time, with no intermediate causes. Given that a cause clearly can have a random effect—say, you press a button and you get a green light or a red light at random—then it should also be […]