It was a privilege as well as a good deal of fun to be involved in this conference honoring so great a thinker as Alvin Plantinga. There are a number of variations on the Grim Reaper Paradox, which you can read about in José Benardete’s entertaining book, Infinity: An Essay in Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), pp. 259-61.
For those who are unfamiliar with the Pruss-Koons version1, we are invited to imagine that there are denumerably infinitely many Grim Reapers (whom we may identify as gods, so as to forestall any physicalistic objections). You are alive at midnight. Grim Reaper #1 will strike you dead at 1:00 a.m. if you are still alive at that time. Grim Reaper #2 will strike you dead at 12:30 a.m. if you are still alive then. Grim Reaper #3 will strike you dead at 12:15 a.m., and so on. Such a situation seems clearly conceivable—given the possibility of an actually infinite number of things—but leads to an impossibility: you cannot survive past midnight, and yet you cannot be killed by any Grim Reaper at any time!
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