Theory by Analogy

Abstract

A is—A.—G. W. F. Hegel (Science of Logic 415)The thing stated and the restatement have constituted an analogy.—Wallace Stevens (129)M-C-M'.—Karl Marx (257)There is a hint of Minerva's owl in medieval philosophy's relation to the apparently mundane formal question of analogy. The problem is everywhere in scholastic thought, inherited from Aristotle and Averroës, then adapted as one of the basic formal mechanisms through which Thomistic logic both transposes its own theological categories onto an older classical framework and apprehends metaphysical relations of being, of identity and difference. Classically, it is by analogy that one conceives the likeness of the unlike, extracting a concept from the individual instances and scattered genera in which it otherwise resides: the quality of wisdom that characterizes God, say, but might differently characterize humans; the property of animation that attaches to humans but differently qualifies beasts. Hegel notes this problem of scholastic analogy in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, when he comments of Aquinas that the category of “substance (forma substantialis) is, for instance, analogous to” Aristotle's notion of entelechy (3: 71) or when he dismisses medieval Latin more generally as “a quite unsuitable instrument” for the consideration of older philosophical forms—in effect, an imprecise exercise in analogy (38).