Seminar: The Doctrine of Analogy [Fall 2024]

“Being is said in many ways”, Aristotle wrote, and to this assertion the history of philosophy has borne extensive witness.  What is the being which is said in many ways?  What are the many ways?  How are they many, how are they one?  These questions have often been asked, and answered, and yet questions of how we predicate sameness in or through differentiated multitudes remain disputed to and likely long past this present day.

For human language, in whatever particular concrete variety, has a capacity to convey all things, from the least possibility to the greatest actuality—nevertheless, imperfectly.  The more removed from the objects of our common experience, the less perfectly we may convey the reality intended.  Crucial to our linguistic comprise and conveyance, therefore, is the doctrine of analogy: not only this capacity, that is, but an understanding of how it is possible in the first place and precisely what it accomplishes.

In this seminar, drawing not only upon the philosophical tradition of Aristotelian-Thomism but engaging also with works in the Scotistic and Semiotic schools of thought, we will undertake to provide a coherent doctrine of analogy, taking up questions of language, of the “analogy of being”, and more besides.