Alexander Pruss

Alexander Robert Pruss (; born January 5, 1973) is a Canadian philosopher and mathematician. He is currently a professor of philosophy and the co-director of graduate studies in philosophy at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

His best known book is The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment (2006). He is also the author of the books, Actuality, Possibility and Worlds (2011), and One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics (2012), and a number of academic papers on religion and theology. He maintains his own philosophy blog and contributed to the Prosblogion philosophy of religion blog.

He is currently the Guinness World Record holder for the "greatest vertical distance climbed on a climbing wall in one hour (individual)" and the "fastest mile on climbing wall (male)."

Biography

Alexander Pruss first lived in Poland, but emigrated to Canada.

He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of British Columbia with a dissertation on Symmetrization, Green’s Functions, Harmonic Measures and Difference Equations, under John J. F. Fournier in 1996, and published several papers in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society and other mathematical journals.

Pruss is a critic of David Lewis's "extreme modal realism," and instead gives "a combined account" of Leibnizian and Aristotelian modality, which integrates the "this-worldly capacities" of the Aristotelian view and Leibniz's account of possible worlds as thoughts in the mind of God.