Please join us for this week's History of Philosophy Works-in-Progress Luncheon! This week's presenter is Dominic LaMantia (Philosophy, University of Notre Dame), who will present on "Scotus, Some Thomists, and the Challenge of Jesuit Nominalism."
Each meeting consists of a presentation by a graduate student, visiting scholar, or faculty member on a project that they are working on in the history of philosophy, followed by a period of comments/questions from other participants. The workshop is designed to give contributors the opportunity to develop ideas and receive helpful feedback on projects/papers in a friendly and low stakes environment.
Lunch is provided for registered attendees.
Abstract: Thomists are famous for their love of invoking analogy. However, there is another group that loves invoking analogy even more: Jesuit Nominalists. I argue that Rodrigo Arriaga and other Jesuit Nominalists hold that, given the definitions of “univocity” and “analogy” agreed upon by many Thomists and Scotists, genus and species terms are predicated analogically of tokens of the same type, e.g., “man” is predicated analogically of Socrates and Plato. Scotus thinks that genus and species terms as well as the concept of being are predicated univocally, and he argues that we should treat these with parity: we can either show that both are univocal or we can show that neither are. As it turns out, the arguments advanced by Thomists against the Nominalists to show the univocity of genus and species terms are remarkably similar to arguments advanced by Scotists for the univocity of the concept of being. As such, these arguments are question begging; given that the Nominalists and Thomists agree that premises used in the Scotist arguments are false, there is no reason for the Nominalists to think that the very similar premises used by the Thomists are true. I conclude that these Thomists are in a difficult dialectical position. Scotus may be right: if analogy can get you everything you want, what’s wrong with using it everywhere?
Originally published at historyofphilosophy.nd.edu.