Philosophy

Corrects classical liberal "limited government" interpretations of "the principle of subsidiarity" from Catholic social teaching by arguing for affinity between the principle and the tradition of American agrarian thought.

Appeared in:

Dale McConkey and Peter Augustine Lawler, eds.,  Faith, Morality, and Civil Society (Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 41-68

and

Faith and Reason 27 (2002): 117-155.

Ockham is usually considered the first to hold a proper theory of mental language, but Aquinas is willing to call the concept, or the act of intellect by which something is understood, a verbum mentis or “mental word.” This essay explores the sense in which Aquinas regarded concepts as language-like.  It argues that Aquinas's understanding of concepts and their objects meant that his application of syntactic and semantic analysis to them did not and could not lead in the direction of theories of mental language as it was conceived by nominalist philosophers.

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.

Cajetan’s analogy theory is usually evaluated in terms of its fidelity to the teachings of Aquinas. But what if Cajetan was trying to answer questions Aquinas himself did not raise, and so could not help to answer? Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia can be interpreted as intending to solve a particular semantic problem: to characterize the unity of the analogical concept, so as to defend the possibility of a non-univocal term’s mediating syllogistic reasoning. Aquinas offers various semantic characterizations of analogy, saying it involves, for instance: signification per prius et posterius; or a ratio propria which is only found in one analogate; or diverse modi significandi with a common res significata. Examined in turn, it is clear that none of Aquinas’s rules for analogy solve the semantic problem described. Cajetan thus cannot be reasonably expected to have intended his analogy treatise primarily as an interpretation or systematization of Aquinas’s teaching on analogy.

The influence of Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia is due largely to its first three chapters, which introduce Cajetan’s three modes of analogy: analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality. Interpreters typically ignore the final eight chapters, which describe further features of analogy of proportionality. This article explains this neglect as a symptom of a failure to appreciate Cajetan’s particular semantic concerns, taken independently from the question of systematizing the thought of Aquinas. After an exegesis of the neglected chapters, which describe the semantics of analogy through the three levels of cognition (simple apprehension, composition and division, and discursive reasoning), the article concludes with observations about the relationship between Cajetan and Aquinas and the philosophical and historical significance of Cajetan’s approach to the semantics of analogy.