Abstract
AbstractThe paper argues from the perspective of a significant strand of interpretation of Aquinas and from insights in cognitive linguistics that a fruitful dialogue between Whitehead and Thomism needs to take into account that metaphysics and talk about God are metaphorical and analogical all the way down. Cognitive linguistics provides an explanatory scheme for explaining how Aquinas’s tectonic use of analogy shifts the ground of our conventional fields of meanings to create space to conceptualize what otherwise would be beyond grasp and to make inferences possible that otherwise would be unthinkable. The essay concludes with a question, admittedly from a particular trajectory of Thomism and cognitive linguistics, about whether Whitehead’s conception of God adequately accounts for the radically metaphorical “imaginative leap” entailed in the Christian conception of God.
Highlights
Philosophers can never hope to formulate these metaphysical first principles
Words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap.[1]
Analysis of Whitehead, comparable to mine of Thomism, would be necessary to determine whether his broader understanding of metaphor and his applications of his first principles are consistent with cognitive linguistics’ specific understanding of human conceptualization and inference as metaphorical all the way down
Summary
Philosophers can never hope to formulate these metaphysical first principles. Aquinas likewise emphasized the analogical character of language about God. But recent studies in cognitive linguistics suggest that any significant conceptions and inferences about “ultimate reality” are metaphorical and analogical all the way down to an extent unforeseen, at least consciously, by either Whitehead or Aquinas. A fruitful dialogue between Whitehead and Thomism needs to take into account the tectonically metaphorical and analogical character of metaphysics and talk about God. The task is more like translating an idiom between languages where there are no parallel structures, than like comparing models or systems with structures that are analogous in some way or other. While I have no doubt that Whitehead’s metaphysics entails a tectonic conceptual mapping, I will conclude with a question, admittedly from a particular trajectory of Thomism and cognitive linguistics, about whether Whitehead’s conception of God adequately accounts for the radically metaphorical “imaginative leap” entailed in the Christian conception of God
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