Thomas de Vio Cajetan produced a highly influential Thomistic treatise on analogy entitled De nominum analogia. The merits of this work have been contested since the sixteenth century. Notable twentieth-century Thomists who adopted many of the teachings of De nominum analogia include Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon. Joshua Hochschild’s The Semantics of Analogy highlighted the significance of chapter ten, where Cajetan applies his theory to resolve the problem of demonstrations that use analogous terms, with the explicit purpose of addressing a (...) serious challenge from Scotists regarding the use of analogy in metaphysics. This paper examines the criticism of Cajetan’s way of using analogous terms in demonstrations by the seventeenth-century Franciscan Scotist Bartolomeo Mastri. It shows how the Thomist differs from the Scotist and analyzes these rival positions. (shrink)

Of singular importance to the medieval theory of transcendentals was the position of John Duns Scotus that there could be a concept of being univocally common, not only to substance and accidents, but even to God and creatures. Scotus''s doctrine of univocal transcendental concepts violated the accepted view that, owing to its generality, no transcendental notion could be univocal. The major difficulty facing Scotus''s doctrine of univocity was to explain how a real, as opposed to a purely logical, concept could (...) be abstracted from what agreed in nothing real, in this case, God and creatures. The present article examines Scotus''s solution to this difficulty and its interpretation in four of his noted fourteenth-century followers. It is shown that the balance Scotus''s solution achieved between the competing demands of the real diversity between God and creatures, on the one side, and the conceptual unity of transcendental being, on the other, is taken in opposed directions by his interpreters. Either the real diversity of God and creatures is given priority, so that the concept of being becomes a purely logical notion, or the real unity of the concept of being is stressed, so that some sort of real community is posited between God and creatures. (shrink)

At the beginning of his influential De Nominum Analogia, Thomas de Vio Cajetan mentions three mistaken positions on analogy. He does not attach names to these positions, but each one was held by distinguished Thomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, their proponents were responding to the same set of challenges from John Duns Scotus that set the agenda for the De Nominum Analogia. In this paper, I would like to do something that Cajetan did not do, and that (...) is, directly consider the merits of the first position in his list of mistaken accounts of analogy; namely, the position that analogy is constituted by disjunction. More specifically, this paper investigates the polemical use for which Hervaeus Natalis deployed analogy of disjunction; the reply of John Duns Scotus; and the implications of this back and forth for understanding the Thomist-Scotist dispute over the concept of being. (shrink)

Since the first decade of the 14th Century, Thomas Aquinas’s disciples have struggled to explain and defend his doctrine of analogy. Analogy after Aquinas: Logical Problems, Thomistic Answers relates a history of prominent Medieval and Renaissance Thomists’ efforts to solve three distinct but interrelated problems arising from their reading both of Aquinas’s own texts on analogy, and from John Duns Scotus’s arguments against analogy and in favor of univocity in Metaphysics and Natural Theology. The first of these three problems concerns (...) Aquinas’s at least apparently disparate statements on whether a name is said by analogy through a single concept or through diverse concepts. The second problem concerns the model of analogy suited for predicating names analogously across the categories of being or about God and creatures. Is “being” said analogously about God and creatures, or substance and accidents, on the model of how “healthy” is said of medicine and an animal, or on the model of how “principle” is said of a point and a line? The third problem comes from outside challenges to Aquinas’s thought, in particular Scotus’ claims that univocal names alone can mediate valid demonstrations, and any demonstration that failed to use its mediating terms univocally would fail by the fallacy of equivocation. Analogy after Aquinas makes a unique contribution to the study of philosophical theology in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas by showing the historical and philosophical connection between these three problems, as well as the variety of solutions proposed by leading representatives of this tradition. Thomists considered in the book include: Hervaeus Natalis (1250-1323), Thomas Sutton (1250-1315), John Capreolus (1380-1444), Dominic of Flanders (1425-1479), Paul Soncinas (d. 1494), Thomas dio vio Cajetan (1469-1534), Francis Silvestri of Ferrara (1474-1528), and Chrysostom Javelli (1470-1538). (shrink)

Duns Scotus defends the view that we can speak univocally of God and creatures. When we do so, we use words in the same sense in the two cases. Scotus maintains that the concepts that these univocal words signify are themselves univocal: the same concept in the two cases. In this paper, I consider a related question: does Duns Scotus have the notion of analogous concepts—concepts whose relation to each other lies somewhere between the univocal and the equivocal? Using some (...) neglected texts from Scotus’s attempt to refute Henry of Ghent’s rejection of univocity, I argue that he does, and that he uses his account of univocity to ground the relation of analogy between two concepts. According to Scotus, analogous concepts are compositional, and overlap at a univocal concept. (shrink)

The first detailed monography on how Thomas Aquinas used the contemporary philosophy of language in his works. Precise interpretations, many tables and schematical drawings give the reader a useful orientation in the field of the new research on Aquinas.

The common view that Aquinas changed his mind about analogy (before and after De Veritate 2.11) is unwarranted. Dialectical context, and clarifications about the logic of analogy and the implications of proportionality, reveal consistency in Aquinas's teaching on the analogy of divine names.

In 1498 Cajetan published a short book, On the Analogy of Names, which is often regarded as a masterly summary of Aquinas's doctrine of analogy. It opens in the very first paragraph with an attack on three views of the concept of being (ens): first, that it is a disjunction of concepts; second, that it is an ordered group of concepts; and third, that it is a single, separate concept which is unequally participated by substances and accidents. A number of (...) questions immediately spring to mind. Why are concepts being discussed when analogy is said by Cajetan to be a theory of language? What is meant by ‘concept’? Who held the views under attack and why? So far as I can tell, the extensive literature on both Aquinas and Cajetan offers no satisfactory answers to these questions. (shrink)

Die Philosophie des Barockscotismus war einerseits durch die rückwärtsgewandte Anknüpfung an den mittelalterlichen Denker Johannes Duns Scotus, andererseits durch die Anknüpfung an die Entwicklung in der zeitgenössischen Scholastik, vor allem der Jesuitenscholastik, geprägt. Welche Art von Metaphysik hat diese besondere philosophiehistorische Konstellation hervorgebracht? Um diese Frage zu beantworten, analysiert die vorliegende Arbeit das Metaphysikwerk des wichtigsten Repräsentanten des frühneuzeitlichen Scotismus, Bartholomaeus Mastrius (1602-1673); sie erschließt außerdem eine Vielzahl von kaum bis gar nicht erforschten Metaphysikwerken aus der Franziskanerscholastik des 17. und (...) 18. Jahrhunderts. Das eigenartige, erstaunliche Vielfalt einschließende Profil einer in Vergessenheit geratenen philosophischen Tradition wird deutlich. Durch den Fokus auf ein philosophiehistorisches Phänomen außerhalb des Mainstreams leistet die Arbeit einen Beitrag zu einer differenzierteren Sichtweise der intellektuellen Kultur der europäischen Frühmoderne. Baroque-age Scotist philosophy was, on the one hand, characterised by recourse to the Medieval thinker John Duns Scotus and, on the other hand, by an adaptation to trends in contemporary scholasticism, first of all that of the Jesuits. What kind of metaphysics did this particular constellation within the history of philosophy produce? In order to answer this question, the present book analyses the work on metaphysics by the most important representative of early modern Scotism, Bartolomeo Mastri (1602-1673). In addition, the book investigates a multitude of scarcely or never studied works on metaphysics from the Franciscan scholastic tradition of the 17th and 18th centuries. The peculiar profile of a forgotten philosophical tradition with its astonishing plurality becomes apparent. By focusing on a phenomenon from the history of philosophy outside the mainstream, this work contributes to a more differentiated view on the intellectual culture in early modern Europe. (shrink)

Parler de Dieu est impossible - mais necessaire... Les maitres des ecoles de theologie du XIIe siecle ont affronte cette question en utilisant des instruments logico-linguistiques elabores par les arts du discours de l'epoque, mais aussi en elaborant une reflexion originale, fondee sur des elements qu'ils trouvaient dans la patristique, le Pseudo-Denys, Augustin, Boece. En quel sens le discours sur Dieu - le Dieu ineffable - est-il enoncable? Les enonces du langage ordinaire sont-ils radicalement impropres a parler de Dieu, en (...) raison de leur nature meme, leur caractere compose, leurs implications temporelles, la division meme en sujet et predicat? Il fallait alors penser les conditions du transfert de ces enonces a la divinite et l'ecart existant entre le discours ordinaire et le discours sur Dieu. Sont-ils dans une equivocite totale, ce qui mine toute possibilite de connaissance, ou dans une univocite supposant un minimum de sens partage? L'analyse des enonces theologiques a egalement conduit a distinguer la signification d'un terme de sa reference (suppositio). Cette distinction medievale, dont on savait qu'elle se developpait a la meme epoque dans la logique terministe, avec la meme attention a la variation en contexte, s'est aussi elaboree au sein de la theologie trinitaire, dans le but de justifier et d'engendrer les enonces orthodoxes. L'etude, qui part des sources antiques pour parcourir les grandes elaborations des theologiens du XIIe siecle, aboutit a une cartographie nouvelle mettant l'accent sur l'apport de l'ecole de Gilbert de Poitiers. (shrink)