Monday, March 21, 2011
Question
Not to constantly bash Thomists... but they deserve it so I will anyway. When did "analogicity" become a useful word to describle analogy? I saw it in Stephen Hipp's (u. of st. thomas) essay in the Scotus Quadruple Conference proceedings and now in the title of steven Long's (ave maria u.) talk at the Fordham... conference. Seriously, this is but more evidence that there is nothing left to say about Aquinas and analogy that hasn't been said a hundred times each decade since the death of Thomas.
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9 comments:
It is a strange term and I have not come across it although I have been around many so called Thomists?
Are they trying to mimic univocity and equivocity
in analogicity?Or could it be being used as to describe an accidental analogy instead of substantial analogy? In one way it could be an attempt to avoid the normal confusion that is often come across when many people automatically assume that analogy is ....metaphysical...
Did not Aristotle or some prior Greek philosopher start the long discussions upon Analogy, Univocity, Equivocity? So maybe you should not blame it entirely upon the poor Thomists....
juliana
My beef with them is with making up stupid words. If you plug "analogy" into the sentences instead, you get the same result. "analogicity" just means analogy. They invented it to sound post-modern and suave. "Analogy" is a perfectly serviceable word.
I'm not sure making up new not quite necessary words is the ground on which you want to attack our friends, given the barbarous stuff we're reading these days. I spent my morning and afternoon wrestling with "contentivity" and "consequiturnity", and don't forget all the "nothingnessess", "intellectity" vs "intellectivity", etc.
Okay, the last two point to a genuinely useful distinction. Still . . .
actually, one can defend our pal PT because latin is a language rich in words for killing and poor in philosophy. He's trying to express hard concepts in a language not designed for it. All those words actually mean something!
Ok, Ok, Scotus made up a lot of words (though, as it turns out, not "formalitas"; I just discovered is in Aquians).
My argument is not with barbarisms, but in using vague words that just mean what their obvious root means.
Maybe if he'd used more o' them killing words and less o' them philosophy words he would have found more readers!
No, of course I agree with you. What, when Heidegger does it it's poetic and shows the strength of the German language and spirit but when Latins do it it's barbarously unciceronian?
And yet, the rule has to be: don't use a big word when a small one will do. I remember my sixth-grade English teacher saying that you couldn't communicate much using only monosyllabic words. I showed her!
Anyway, though 1st-century Latin was poor in philosophical words, so was 13th century English. Both have made up for it in the intervening ages.
and in any case, its not like the scotizantes made up these words to appeal to the humanists like this fake thomist pomo word!
Well, to play an andvocatus diaboli: I think there can be made a distinction in meaning between analogicity and analogy. Analogicity is a property of a term or concept that is analogous, it is the formal cause of his being analogous, to put it scholastically. Analogy is the nexus of relations between the various analogata (referents of an analogical term or concept). A Thomist might say that there is an analogy between God and creature, due to which the concept of being has the property of analogicity.
Thanks, dr. Novak. I guess it's too subtle for me.
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