Recent Dissertation on Univocity and Analogy

Perusing the blogosphere I came across an announcement of a recent dissertation defense by one Domenic D'Ettore in the Houston Thomistic Studies Program.  I wanted to post it here to applaud such research. If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times, there are enough books and articles on the analogy of being in Thomas Aquinas troubling the unhappy world.  What is needed is research into Thomistic attempts to deal with Scotus, who has no theory of analogy at all in his mature writings.  So here have just such a dissertation.


Here's the announcement:

The purpose of D’Ettore’s dissertation, titled “Early Thomists on Demonstration with Analogous Terms,” is to defend the demonstration through analogical terms given by early Thomists, such as Thomas of Sutton (1250-1315/20) and John Capreolus (1380-1444), in the face of objections that such demonstration is fallacious from John Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308) and those influenced by Scotus, such as Henry of Harclay (ca. 1270-1317) and Peter of Auriol (ca. 1280-1322). 

The virtue of the Scotist position is its preservation of the apparent integrity of arguments from perfections in creatures to those same perfections in God. The weakness of this position is that it blurs the distinction between God and creatures. The strength of the Thomist position is the preservation of the distinction of God from creatures. 

D’Ettore’s dissertation considers whether or not the early Thomist tradition provides the contemporary Thomist with an adequate answer as to how Thomas’s doctrine of analogy avoids the problems Scotus and his early successors find in it and what aspects these Thomists left for future Thomists to develop.