Alexander R. Pruss:

Selected Papers and Essays

For a list of publications, please see my CV.  A number of the papers here are works in progress.  Comments are welcome, especially on the works in progress.  Click on the title of a paper if you want to read the paper.

Quick links: [Metaphysics and logic] [Philosophy of religion and theology] [Ethics] [Mathematical papers]

Philosophical and theological papers

Metaphysics and logic

• "Identity and the Copying of Minds". I argue against psychological theories of identity that claim that in cases where one's personality and memories are moved into the brain of another, we move with them. I am not entirely convinced by my arguments here, I must confess, but I think they deserve some thought.
• "Freedom, Determinism and Gale's Principle."  I give an argument for incompatibilism on the basis of a plausible supervenience principle and a weakened version of Gale's principle that if all my actions were intentionally caused by another person, then none of my actions were free.
• "Special Relativity and Endurantism."  I identify a fallacy in Hales and Johnson's argument that endurantism is incompatible with special relativity and argue that an improvement on their argument also does not succeed.
• "Processes, Marks and Light-Spots."  I give a simple counterexample to Salmon's account of causal processes in terms of mark transmission.  The example has the advantage that not only does it appear to qualify as transmission of a mark under Salmon's definition of mark transmission, but it appears to actually be an instance of mark transmission.
• "Animalism and Brains".  I argue that it is possible for a human animal to survive the loss of all bodily parts other than the brain.
• "B-Theory, Language and Ethics", Philosophy of Time Group Meeting, Eastern APA, 2006.
• The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment, Cambridge University Press, in 2006.  No longer available online, but can be purchased from amazon.com.
• "Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit: Arguments New and Old for the Principle of Sufficient Reason", presented at the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting, Cincinnati, November, 2002
• "Comments on John Haldane's 'The Soul'", presented in Pittsburgh, April 5, 2003.  (Handout is also available.)
• Possible Worlds: What They Are Good For and What They Are.  Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2001.
• "The Actual and the Possible."  In Richard M. Gale (ed.), Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002.  A discussion of two contemporary views of the nature of possibility and possible worlds, and a theistic alternative.  Includes a new version of the Third Way, and ethical objections to David Lewis's extreme modal realism.
• "David Lewis's Counterfactual Arrow of Time."  Published in Nous.  I argue that David Lewis's counterfactual account of the direction of time fails in a number of cases, and in other cases only succeeds because the cases are chosen by us in ways that cohere with our time-reversal-asymmetric concerns.
• "The Subjunctive Conditional Law of Excluded Middle."  Work in progress.  This Law claims that for any pair of propositions p and q, it is true that were p to hold, q would hold or it is true that were p to hold, not-q would hold.  I show that given plausible suppositions the Law is false.
• "The Cardinality Objection to David Lewis's Modal Realism."  Philosophical Studies 104 (2001) 167-176.  The collection of all possible worlds is too large to have cardinality and hence possible worlds cannot be existent concrete entities.
• "What Are Aristotelian Forms?"  Work in progress.  Prescinding from detailed exegesis of texts, what kind of an entity is an Aristotelian form?  Can the notion be made intelligible in a contemporary setting?  What would one be saying about the world by saying that there are Aristotelian forms?
• "Recombination, Alien Properties and Laws of Nature"  A criticism of recombinationist theories of possibility, and an argument against views that utterly reject alien properties.
• "Functionalism and Counting Minds."  Work in progress.  In general there is no fact of the matter as to how many machines are computing any given program.  Since there plainly is a fact of the matter as to how many persons are conscious in a given way, it follows that being a conscious person is not simply a matter of being an appropriate computing system.
• "Can Two Equal Infinity?  The Attributes of God in Spinoza."  Work in progress.  Spinoza's God has "infinite attributes", even though only Extension and Thought are mentioned explicitly?  I argue that Spinoza, given his commitment to the truthmaker principle that any true proposition is made true by something positive, can neither say nor deny that Extension and Thought are the only two attributes.  I end with a truthmaker-based ontological argument for the existence of God that might be of interest independently of Spinoza.
• "Lewis's Semantics for Subjunctive Conditionals and Some Plausible Rules of Inference." [PDF] Forthcoming in Synthese.  I show that on a plausible interpretation of the closeness relation between worlds, Lewis's account of subjunctive conditionals fails to support two obvious rules of inference concerning conjunctions of consequents or disjunctions of antecedents.  I offer a modification of Lewis's semantics that solves this problem, but note that some difficulty still remains.  I also characterize when the subjunctive conditional law of excluded middle holds.
• "Causation and the Arrow of Time."  I argue that the direction of time probably supervenes on the directions of causal relations.

Philosophy of religion and theology

• "Love and Obedience" I give an account showing how duties of love entail duties of obedience, especially where the beloved is God.
• "Should we prevent evil if sceptical theism is right?"
I argue that the answer is affirmative, pace Oppy.
• "Some recent progress on the cosmological argument." [PDF] Presented at the Two Tasks Conference, Alexandria, Virginia, June, 2006.
• "How not to reconcile evolution and creation."  Presented at the University of Notre Dame, March 8, 2006.
• "Altruism, Teleology and God." [PDF] Presented at the Harvard Divinity School, December, 2005.
• "The Cosmos as a Work of Art."  Presented at Epiphanies of Beauty conference, University of Notre Dame, November, 2004.
• "Prophecy without Middle Knowledge."  Accepted for publication in Faith and Philosophy subject to revision.  I argue that the best available way to solve the problems with how prophecy works given Middle Knowledge requires the invocation of a principle of relevant similarity which states that an agent would have acted in the same way had the circumstances been relevantly similar.  But if one is willing to allow this for a fairly lax measure of relevant similarity, then one can get prophecy without Middle Knowledge, assuming only divine foreknowledge.
• "Programs, Bugs, DNA and a Design Argument."  I give an analogical argument for the existence of a designer of our DNA based on the applicability of the concept of a genetic disorder. 
• "Can one infer design without knowing the function or purpose of a thing?"  While the principle still seems plausible to me, in this very short "paper" I present an apparent counterexample.
• "On Three Problems of Divine Simplicity."  Presented at the Society of Christian Philosophers satellite session at the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting, 2003.  I consider three of the most serious philosophical objections to the doctrine of divine simplicity and offer reflections that make these objections less poignant, and that in fact suggest that the incoherence claimed to be there might not be there.
• "Fine and Coarse Tuning, Renormalizability and Probabilistic Reasoning."  Presented at a workshop on fine-tuning, Notre Dame University, April, 2003.
• "Comments on Alvin Plantinga's 'Games Scientists Play'."  Presented in Pittsburgh, April 5, 2003 at a conference in honor of Richard M. Gale.  (Handout is also available.)
• "A Restricted Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Cosmological Argument."  Accepted by Religious Studies.  Some people reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) because of apparent counterexamples like libertarian free will, quantum mechanics or the conjunction of all contingent propositions.  I offer a natural restriction of the PSR that takes care of all such supposed counterexamples, a restricted version nonetheless sufficiently strong to ground a Cosmological Argument.
• "A New Free Will Defense."  Forthcoming in Religious Studies.  If creatures are to have significant free will, then God's essential omnibenevolence and essential omnipotence cannot logically preclude him from creating a world containing a moral evil.  This is argued for with no reliance on subjunctive conditionals of free will, but in several independent ways based on premises that many will accept.
• With Richard M. Gale.  "A Response to Almeida and Judisch."  International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming).  A response to some criticisms of our new cosmological argument.
• With Richard M. Gale.  "A New Cosmological Argument."  Religious Studies 35 (1999) 461–476.  For every true proposition p, possibly p has an explanation.  We argue from this weak version of the principle of sufficient reason that there exists a powerful and intelligent Designer-Creator of the universe.
• "Christian Faith and Belief."  Forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.  Louis Pojman (as well as others in different ways) has claimed that a Christian does not need to believe the propositions of the Christian faith even with epistemic probability 1/2.  However, once we consider the nature of ethical decision making in cases of uncertainty about moral principles, we see that for many if not most Christians a commitment to acting in Christian ways requires assigning an epistemic probability of at least 1/2 to Christianity.
• "Faith, Paradox, Reason, and the Argumentum Spiritus Sancti in Climacus and Kierkegaard."  (Short version.)  Presented at the meeting of the Soren Kierkegaard society at the 2001 Central APA.  This is a pseudonymous production, mirroring the pseudonymous productions of Kierkegaard, exploring both the nature of the absurdity involved in faith according to Climacus and Kierkagaard as well as broader issues of the interpretation of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
• "Faith, Paradox, Reason, and the Argumentum Spiritus Sancti in Climacus and Kierkegaard."  (Long version.)
• "Samkara's Principle and Two Ontomystical Arguments."  International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49 (2001) 111-120.  Two ontological arguments are given, one of them apparently new, and the crucial possibility premises in them are argued for on the basis of mystical experience.
• "A Religious Experience Argument for the Existence of a Transcendent Holy Being."  Work in progress.  Experiences fall into irreducible classes.  Any class of actual cognitive experiences contains an experience which is right, in the sense that it is veridical or at least that which it purports about reality is indeed so.  Mystical experiences of a transcendent holy being constitute a class of cognitive experiences.  Hence there is a transcendent holy being.
• "Meyer's proof of the existence of God."  A summary of Meyer's attempt at proving the existence of God by means of a strong causal principle and Zorn's Lemma from set theory.
• "The Unwritten Esther."  A short prize-winning essay on the Book of Esther.