Allism

See also: allism

English

Alternative forms

• allism

Etymology 1

From all +‎ -ism, coined by David Lewis in his 1989 paper "Noneism or Allism?".

Noun

Allism (uncountable)

1. (metaphysics) A belief in the existence of all possible entities including past and future things or unactualised possibilities.
   • 2011, Angelica Nuzzo, Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, →ISBN:

     Allism is the position of those who think that all these entities actually exist, and moreover, everything we can speak meaningfully about in some sense exists.

   • 2012 June 1, Richard Woodward, “Towards Being”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:

     Allism is noneism with a twist. Fore whereas the noneist holds that some objects have no kind of being at all, the allist holds that every object has being.

   • 2012 July 25, Graham Priest, “Lost in Translation: a Reply to Woodward”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:

     But the rewritten noneist theory just is Allism [the view that everything over which the noneist quantifies exists] and our new quantifiers are defined in exactly the same way as Quine's!

Etymology 2

From all +‎ -ism, coined by Peter van Inwagen in 2009.

Noun

Allism (uncountable)

1. (creationism) The rejection of creationism in all its forms (including intelligent design) and the assertion that evolution alone is responsible for the diversity of all living creatures.
   • 2009, Louis Caruana, Darwin and Catholicism, →ISBN, page 12:

     Let us call it Allism – since it is essentially the thesis that natural selection does it all.

   • 2009, Melville Y. Stewart, Science and Religion in Dialogue, →ISBN, page 823:

     Allism is inconsistent with theism, and, therefore, anyone who professes ignorance as to whether Allism is true should profess ignorance as to whether God exists.

   • 2013, A. Rosenberg, Theism and Allism in The Philosophy of Peter Van Inwagen Ed. John Christopher Adorno Keller