Abstract

Thomas de Vio Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia is usually interpreted as an attempt to systematize Thomas Aquinas's views on analogy. This approach ignores historical and philosophical context and fails to make sense of Cajetan's teaching on analogy. ;The present study offers a reinterpretation of Cajetan's treatise, beginning with a reconstruction of the specific questions De Nominum Analogia tries to answer. Traditionally understood as a mean between equivocation and univocation, analogy is usually described as a kind of equivocation whose diverse significations are somehow related. This raises two questions: What is the character of this relation? And if analogy is a kind of equivocation, how can this relation provide unity sufficient to avoid causing the fallacy of equivocation? These semantic questions, latent in the Aristotelian logical tradition, were brought to the fore by Scotus's arguments against analogy. Insufficiently answered in the writings of Aquinas, they became preoccupations of Cajetan's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. ;Cajetan's De Nominum Analogia is fruitfully read as a semantic analysis of analogy designed to address these questions. Cajetan's two well-known central teachings on analogy are: that there are three modes of analogy---analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proportionality; and that analogy of proportionality is the most proper mode of analogy. The threefold division of analogy constitutes three alternative accounts of how diverse significates can be somehow related, and Cajetan favors analogy of proportionality because only the unity of this mode of analogy allows a non-univocal term to avoid the fallacy of equivocation. This study finds, then, that proportional unity is the key to Cajetan's semantic analysis of analogy, and that most of De Nominum Analogia articulates the ramifications of proportional unity through all the three parts of traditional Aristotelian logic: simple apprehension, composing and dividing, and discursive reasoning. This interpretation makes sense of Cajetan's attention to "concepts," and confirms that semantic analysis is consistent with an appreciation for the role of judgment in the use of analogical terms. ;An appendix contains the author's English translations of De Nominum Analogia and the letter De Conceptu Entis, parallel with the Latin text