How to Be Omnipresent

American Philosophical Quarterly 54 (3):223-234 (2017)
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Abstract

Attributions of omnipresence, most familiar within the philosophy of religion, typically take the omnipresence of an entity to either consist in that entity's occupation of certain regions or be dependent upon other of that entity's attributes, such as omnipotence or omniscience. This paper defends an alternative conception of omnipresence that is independent of other purported divine attributes and dispenses with occupation. The resulting view repurposes the metaphysics of necessitism and permanentism, taking omnipresent entities to be those entities that exist at all regions. This view is then shown to best accommodate attributions of omnipresence to a diverse range of metaphysical posits, like abstract entities, and a more diverse class of religious posits.

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Author Profiles

Sam Cowling
Denison University
Wesley Cray
Texas Christian University

Citations of this work

Relativity and the Causal Efficacy of Abstract Objects.Tim Juvshik - 2020 - American Philosophical Quarterly 57 (3):269-282.
God’s place in the world.Matthew James Collier - 2020 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 89 (1):43-65.
Creating abstract objects.David Friedell - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (10):e12783.
Omnipresence.Edward Wierenga - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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The Coherence of Theism (revised edition).Richard Swinburne - 1977 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.

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