The June 5 Theology-Philosophy Meeting

The Workshop on Value Exploration (www.usi.ch/en/feeds/28055) will end with the June 5 Theology-Philosophy Meeting. The Meeting will have the honor to welcome Professor Dean W. Zimmerman (Rutgers New-Brunswick) as speaker and Professor Hans Christian Schmidbaur as chair.

Date:
June 5 2024

Venue:
Room 0.5, FTL Building
USI West Campus, Via Buffi 13
Lugano, Switzerland

This conference will also be streamed on Zoom, to get the link, write to: [email protected]

Schedule:

Wednesday, June 5

17:30-19:00 Theology-Philosophy Meeting with Dean W. Zimmerman

Speaker:

Dean W Zimmerman
Distinguished Professor
Department of Philosophy
Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion
Rutgers-New Brunswick

Omnipresence and Special Modes of Divine Presence

Abstract: There is much philosophical controversy about what it is for a thing to occupy a place.  Many metaphysicians accept a dualism of space and space-occupiers, and posit a fundamental location relation that holds between the two; but they disagree about the nature of that relation.  Simultaneously, several analytic theologians have been developing occupation accounts of omnipresence — theories according to which God’s presence in space is not highly derivative or indirect, but is rather a species of whatever fundamental relation holds between other things and space.  By exploring the range of possible theories of divine presence, I aim to sharpen the tools available to philosophically-oriented theologians, and thereby clarify the range of available views about the divine ubiety — or, perhaps, ubieties, if God is present in more than one way.

Bio: Dean Zimmerman earned a bachelors degree from Minnesota State University­–Mankato, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University.  He has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Syracuse University, and Rutgers, where he is now a Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department and co-director (with Brian Leftow) of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion.  Zimmerman is founding editor of Oxford Studies in Metaphysics (now co-edited with Karen Bennett), and co-editor of Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Religion (with Lara Buchak).  He has co-edited several other books, including Metaphysics:  The Big Questions (Blackwell, 2008), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2003), Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics (Blackwell, 2008), Persons:  Human and Divine(Oxford University Press, 2007), and God in an Open Universe (Pickwick, 2011).  His publications include over 50 articles in scholarly journals and books.  

With generous support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project: Alain Pe-Curto, TMPFP1_210654).