Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T14:30:29.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Real Presence in the Eucharist and time-travel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 October 2014

MARTIN PICKUP
MARTIN PICKUP*
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford, OX1 3BN, UK e-mail: martin.pickup@new.ox.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article aims to bring some work in contemporary analytic metaphysics to discussions of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I will show that some unusual claims of the Real Presence doctrine exactly parallel what would be happening in the world if objects were to time-travel in certain ways. Such time-travel would make ordinary objects multiply located, and in the relevantly analogous respects. If it is conceptually coherent that objects behave in this way, we have a model for the behaviour of the Eucharist which shows the doctrine to be coherent, at least with respect to the issues discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 51 , Special Issue 3: Religious Studies at 50 , September 2015 , pp. 379 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arntzenius, Frank & Maudlin, Tim (2013) ‘Time travel and modern physics’, in Zalta, Edward (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2013 edn), http://www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/time-travel-phys/.Google Scholar
Baber, H. E. (2013) ‘The real presence’, Religious Studies, 49, 19–33.Google Scholar
Effingham, Nick & Robson, Jon (2007) ‘A mereological challenge to endurantism’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 85, 633–640.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Cody (2007) ‘Time travel, coinciding objects, and persistence’, in Zimmerman, Dean (ed.) Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, III (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 177–198.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Cody (2009) ‘Why parthood might be a four place relation, and how it behaves if it is’, in Honnefelder, L., Runggaldier, E. & Schick, B. (eds) Unity and Time in Metaphysics (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 83–133.Google Scholar
Hawley, Katherine (2002) How Things Persist (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar
Leftow, Brian (2004) ‘A Latin trinity’, Faith and Philosophy, 21, 304–333.Google Scholar
Lewis, David (1986) On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell).Google Scholar
Pruss, Alexander R. (2009) ‘The eucharist: real presence and real absence’, in Flint, T. & Rae, M. (eds) Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 512–537.Google Scholar
Smith, Nicholas J. J. (2013) ‘Time travel’, in Zalta, Edward (ed.) The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (winter 2013 edn), http://www.plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/time-travel/.Google Scholar
Sider, Theodore (2001) Four-Dimensionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).Google Scholar