Volume 3, Issue 2, Fall 2014
Lynda Gaudemard
Pages 32-53
L’omniprésence de Dieu. Descartes face à More (1648-1649)
In this paper, I shall suggest that, what Descartes supported in his letter to More of August 1649, when he claimed that God’s essence might be present everywhere, was not that God can’t exist without being extended, i.e. being omnipresent, but that God has necessarily the disposition to be extended. If my interpretation is correct, then the claim that God’s essence is omnipresent is consistant with the thesis that God is omnipresent ratione potentia.