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Perceiving an imperceptible God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 1998

Edward L. Schoen
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green KY 42101-3576

Abstract

While reports of sensory encounters with the divine come from a variety of religious traditions, philosophers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Robert Oakes have argued that such experiences of incorporeal divine beings are impossible. Nevertheless, by clarifying various relations among acts of perception, perceptual detections of presence and kinds of perceptual recognition, the sensory perception of imperceptible things emerges as a coherent possibility. So, even if they are essentially unobservable, incorporeal divine beings still fall well within the range of normal human sense perception.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

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