Idolatry is vehemently rejected by the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and closely connected with idolatry are certain varieties of anthropomorphism, which involve the attribution of a human form or personality to God. The question investigated in this paper is whether a highly anthropomorphic conception of God, one that commits the sin of idolatry, is entailed by a particular theory of religious language. This theory is the 'univocity thesis', the view that, for some substitutions for 'F', the sense (...) of '___ is F' as applied to God and its sense as applied to human creatures is exactly or substantially the same. My claim is that the univocity thesis entails a strong form of anthropomorphism that in effect reduces God to creaturely status and thus succumbs to idolatry (albeit a conceptual form of idolatry). In the course of my argument, a comparison is made between, on the one hand, the methods of Duns Scotus and modern proponents of perfect-being theology in arriving at a concept of God as maximally perfect, and on the other hand the work of Thomistic philosophers (especially Barry Miller) in showing how a more adequate conception of divinity can be reached by dispensing with some of the methods and assumptions of perfect-being theology, particularly the assumption of univocity. (shrink)

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (shrink)

We pay attention to the concept of univocal connective. Considering the corresponding definition in the context of the sequent calculus a problem arises in a paper by Belnap. We provide an explanation by Belnap and finally give some examples and non-examples of univocal connectives.

I pursue an answer to the psychological question “what is it for S to presuppose that p?” I will not attempt a general answer. Rather, I will explore a particular kind of presuppositions that are constituted by the mental act of reasoning: Inferential presuppositions. Indeed, I will consider a specific kind of inferential presuppositions—one that is constituted by a specific reasoning competence: The univocality competence. Roughly, this is the competence that reliably governs the univocal thought-components’ operation as univocal in a (...) line of reasoning. I will argue that the exercise of this reasoning competence constitutes certain inferential presuppositions. More specifically, I outline a conception of an inferential presupposition as a non-attitudinal but genuinely psychological and rationally committing relation that holds between a reasoner and a proposition. Thus, inferential presuppositions may be distinguished from tacit or standing attitudes that function as premise-beliefs in reasoning. Likewise inferential presuppositions may be distinguished from other kinds of presuppositions. In conclusion, I note some features of inferential presuppositions that bear on the epistemology of inference. (shrink)

This essay offers a reading of Badiou’s univocity of being in relation to his understanding of ontological immanence and also his commitment or indeed “fidelity” to ontologically articulating the atheistic premise that “God is dead”—which for Badiou also means “the One is not”. Although Badiou famously deploys set theory to develop his “univocal” mathematical ontology of the multiple in Being and Event, his most sustained and detailed discussion of the univocity of being is in his controversial critique of (...) Deleuze’s ontology in his Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. While references to (Badiou’s reading of) Deleuze will be made, it is not the purpose of this essay to add to the existing scholarship on the Deleuze-Badiou debate. Instead, the chief aim here is to apply Badiou’s accusations and criticisms of Deleuze’s univocal ontology back to Badiou’s own ontological project, and thereby consider how Badiou reconciles his “commitment to radical ontological univocity” with his metaphysical position against “the One” most vividly expressed in his critique of Deleuze’s univocal ontology. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Albert the Great’s notion of univocal analogy, which he raised in his Commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius’s De divinis nominibus. While other scholars such as Francis Ruello and Alain de Libera have addressed “analogy” as it pertains to Albert, I intend to treat the “univocal” aspect of “univocal analogy” so as to explain (1) how it informs Albert’s teaching on analogy, and (2) how it remains opposed to any pantheistic reduction of God to creature. While my own (...) account remains close to that of Ruello and De Libera, I hope to show how primacy is to be accorded to univocity in such a manner that, in actual reality, for Albert, it is analogy that qualifies univocity rather than vice versa. (shrink)

O âmbito da fenomenologia pode ser circonscrito pelo que Husserl chamou de a priori universal da correlação entre o ente transcendente e seus modos subjetivos de doação. Este a priori significa ao mesmo tempo que a essência do ente envolve sua relação com uma consciência e que o sentido de ser do sujeito consiste em se relacionar com o ente transcendante, em fazê‑lo aparecer, o que equivale a dizer que uma consciência que não fosse cons-ciência de algo, ou seja, intencionalidade, (...) não seria. A dificuldade aqui é a de dar conta do sentido de ser dos pólos da correlação, a saber, do ente transcendente e do sujeito, à luz dessa correlação, que remete a uma forma de primado da relação sobre os termos. Trata‑se de se perguntar o que significa aparecer, qual é o estatuto daquilo que aparece e, enfim, qual é o modo de ser daquilo que chamamos de intencionalidade. Eu queria mostrar que a fenomenologia é fadada a se ultrapassar em proveito duma cosmologia e duma metafísica, que aparecem não como campos que lhe seriam estrangeiros mas, muito pelo contrário, como dimensões internas e constitutivas da própria fenomenologia. (shrink)

I argue that Locke’s various descriptions of real essence pick out one and the same thing, namely a nature that can be ascribed to many things, and in terms of which we can get matters of classification right or wrong. On my reading, Locke does not attack real essences of the sort that are the essences of real species, but rather the presumption that a sorting according to our species concepts and their names is a sorting of things according to (...) their real essences. And the lesson of Locke’s empirical argument against that presumption, I argue, is that our species concepts often function more like higher taxa, grouping together things that knowledge of their real essences would distinguish into distinct lowest species. (shrink)

What role does Scotus‘s understanding of univocity play in Cajetan‘s development of a theory of analogy? In this paper I examine three relevant texts from Cajetan (question 3 of his commentary on Aquinas‘s De Ente et Essentia, his treatise De Nominum Analogia, and his commentary on question 13, article 5 of Aquinas‘s Summa Theologiae) in which Cajetan articulates his understanding of analogy at least in part through dialectical engagement with Scotus‘s arguments about univocity.

Introduction -- The univocity of being -- The modern predicament -- The problem of univocity in ancient and medieval philosophy -- From Heidegger to Aristotle -- Medieval philosophy -- Scholasticism -- Heidegger, Scotus, and univocity -- The question of being -- Analogy, the medieval experience of life -- Univocity and phenomenology -- Destruction and tradition -- Metaphysics -- Phenomenological philosophy and aletheia -- Descartes, scholasticism, and time -- The presupposition of the tradition -- Scholasticism, analogy, and (...) the interpretation of Heidegger -- The phenomena of beingness and time -- Beyond being -- The analogical interpretation of Heidegger's text -- Univocity and phenomenological philosophy -- Being and some other key terms -- The phenomenology of being and the question of Dasein -- Transcendental philosophy -- Univocity from 1916 to 1927 -- Cartesian connections and the medieval ontology -- Dasein, univocity, and the question of analogy -- Univocity and fundamental ontology -- Husserl and Heidegger -- Phenomenology, being, and univocity -- Univocity and analogy -- Univocity and Heidegger's later thought -- Mysticism -- The present age -- The later Heidegger -- A-letheia, ereignis, and epochal immanence -- A history of being -- The tradition -- The history of metaphysics -- The medieval and the modern -- A history of the modern : subjectivity -- Univocity and the problem of history -- History and civilization -- Art and history -- Fractured history -- Language and poetry -- The fate of univocity -- The re-enchanted forest -- Being mortal. (shrink)

I shall confine my attention to the one Scotist doctrine that seems to be singled out as especially worrisome, the doctrine of univocity. In the first part of the paper I argue that the doctrine of univocity is true. So even if the doctrine has unwelcome consequences, we ought to affirm it anyway; it is not the job of the theologian or philosopher to shrink from uncomfortable truths. In the second part I argue further that the doctrine of (...) univocity is salutary. That is, it does not have the deplorable consequences that have been attributed to it. It should be noted that by “consequences” I mean logical consequences. What historical consequences the doctrine may have had are beside the point: if people have been led astray by false inferences from the doctrine of univocity, the proper remedy is to correct their inferences, not to reject univocity. (shrink)

Scotus’ theory of univocity is described: his exact definition of univocity and his view of transcendental concepts that are ‘simply simple’. These concepts are said to be univocally applied to God and creatures. Next, we describe Scotus’ views on univocity in ‘being’ and the precise meaning of the infinite and finite ‘mode’ of being. Finally, we apply these results to work of Heidegger and Marion. It appears that they had an insufficient grasp of the intricacies of Scotus’ (...) theory of univocity and that Marion’s religious phenomenology could have benefitted from these scotistic tools. (shrink)

This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what (...) they call the “final avatar” of phenomenology – that is, the “fleshism” that Merleau-Ponty proposes in his unfinished but justly famous work, The Visible and the Invisible. It will be argued that both Deleuze’s basic criticisms of phenomenology, as well as he and Guattari’s problems with the concept of the flesh, do not adequately come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Merleau-Ponty is not obviously partisan to what Deleuze finds problematic in this tradition, despite continuing to identify himself as a phenomenologist, and is working within a surprisingly similar framework in certain key respects. In fact, in the more positive part of this paper, we will compare Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, and Deleuze’s equally infamous univocity of being, as a means to consider the broader question of the ways in which the two philosophers consider ontological thought, its meaning and its conditions. It is our belief that through properly understanding both positions, a rapprochement, or at least the foundation for one, can be established between these two important thinkers. (shrink)

The article explains the notion of univocity in line with the mature Scotistic doctrine, which plays so crucial a role in the Scotistic rejection of analogy as a middle ground between univocity and pure equivocity. Since univocity of a concept is found to consist in its perfect unity, and the perfect unity of a concept is achieved by means of perfect abstraction, the notion of this so-called abstraction by precision is made clear and contrasted with the so-called (...) abstraction by confusion, by means of which analogical concepts are supposed to be formed by the Thomists. (shrink)

Horan offers a substantial challenge to the narrative of radical orthodoxy's idiosyncratic take on Scotus and his role in ushering in the philosophical age of the modern. This volume not only corrects the received account of Scotus but opens a constructive way forward toward a positive assessment and appropriation of Scotus's work for contemporary theology. --Book cover.

들뢰즈의 ‘존재의 일의성’ 이론에 따르면, 존재란 모든 존재자들에게 ‘같은 하나의 의미’로 언명되는 것이다. 존재가 이처럼 서로 다른 모든 존재자들에게 ‘같은 하나의 의미’로 언명될 수 있으려면, 존재란 이들 모든 존재자들에게 공통적인 어떤 것이 될 수 있어야 한다고 우리는 생각한다. 그런데 ‘존재의 일의성’이 함축하는 듯이 보이는 이러한 ‘존재의 공통성’은 오직, 모든 존재자들이 서로 일말의 차이도 없이 모두들 똑같은 것을 가지게 되는 조건에서만 가능하게 되는 것이라고 우리는 생각한다. 우리는 ‘온주름운동’에 대한 들뢰즈의 주장이, 즉 존재하는 모든 것들 사이에는 ‘각자가 자기 자신 속에 다른 모든 (...) 것들을 함축하게 되는’ 보편적인 상호함축의 운동이 펼쳐지고 있다는 것을 말하는 이 주장이, ‘존재의 공통성’에 대한 우리의 이 같은 이해가 정당하다는 것을 보여준다고 생각한다. ‘존재의 일의성’이 ‘존재의 공통성’을 함축하는 것이라는 우리의 주장에 대해, 또한, 더 나아가, 이러한 ‘존재의 공통성’을 ‘모든 존재자들이 서로 일말의 차이도 없이 모두들 똑같은 것을 가지고 있다’는 것을 주장하는 것으로 이해해야 한다는 우리의 주장에 대해, 많은 반론이 있을 것으로 예상된다. 우리는 이 글에서 들뢰즈가 어떤 경위를 거쳐 이 같은 ‘온주름운동’에 대한 주장에 이르게 되는지를 살펴봄으로써, 우리의 이 같은 주장이 정당하다는 것을 옹호하려 한다. 그런데, 다른 한편, 존재의 일의성은 또한 ‘존재=차이’라는 것도, 즉 존재가 ‘같은 하나의 의미’로 언명되는 이들 모든 존재자들이 서로 다른 차이들이라는 것도, 주장하는 것이다. 그렇다면 ‘존재의 일의성’은 ‘존재의 공통성’과 ‘존재=차이’라는 서로 모순되는 듯이 보이는 이 두 가지를 어떻게 동시에 주장할 수 있는 것일까? 들뢰즈의 ‘존재의 일의성’과 관련하여 사람들이 겪는 많은 어려움과 논란들은 이 두 가지 주장 사이에 극복할 수 없는 모순이 있다고 생각하기 때문에 생기는 것이라고 우리는 생각한다. 그런데 들뢰즈는 니체의 영원회귀를 이러한 존재의 일의성을 완성시켜 주는 것으로 평가한다. 우리는 이러한 니체의 영원회귀가 어떻게 이해되어야 하는지를, 또한 그렇게 이해되는 이 영원회귀가 어떻게 해서 존재의 일의성이 요구하고 있는 듯이 보이는 저 두 가지 주장을 서로 모순 없이 동시에 긍정할 수 있게 해주는지를 살펴보려 한다. (shrink)

This article considers the attempt by a prominent fifteenth-century follower of Thomas Aquinas, Dominic of Flanders, to address John Duns Scotus’ most famous argument for the univocity of being. According to Scotus, the intellect must have a concept of being that is univocal to substantial and accidental being, and to finite and infinite being, on the grounds that an intellect cannot be both certain and doubtful through the same concept, but an intellect can be certain that something is a (...) being while doubting whether it is a substance or accident, finite or infinite. The article shows how Flandrensis’ reply in defence of analogy of being hinges on a more fundamental disagreement with Scotus over the division of the logically one. It also shows how Flandrensis’ answer to this question commits him to a position on the unity of the concept of being that lies between the positions of Scotus and of Flandrensis’ earlier Thomistic sources. (shrink)

This article reaches out to the audience for controversial religious writing after the English Reformation, by examining the shared language of attainable truth, of clarity and certainty, to be found in Protestant and Catholic examples of the same. It argues that we must consider those aspects of religious controversy that lie simultaneously above and beneath its doctrinal content: the logical forms in which it was framed, and the assumptions writers made about their audiences’ needs and responses. Building on the work (...) of Susan Schreiner and others on the notion of certainty through the early Reformation, the article asks how English polemicists exalted and opened up that notion for their readers’ benefit, through proclamations of visibility, accessibility and honest dealing. Two case studies are chosen, in order to make a comparison across confessional lines: first, Protestant reactions against the Jesuit doctrine of equivocation in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which emphasized honesty and encouraged fear of hidden meaning; and second, Catholic opposition to the notion of an invisible-or relatively invisible-church. It is argued that the language deployed in opposition to these ideas displays a shared emphasis on the clear, certain, and reliable, and that which might be attained by human means. Projecting the emphases and assertions of these writers onto their audience, and locating it within a contemporary climate, the article thus questions the emphasis historians of religion place on the intangible-on faith-in considering the production and the reception of Reformation controversy. (shrink)

A double ambiguity has been charged against Rawls’s difference principle (DP). Is it Maximin, Leximin, or something else? Usually, following A. Sen, scholars identify DP with the so-called Leximin. One argues here that one has to distinguish 1° the Leximin, 2° the Maximin (as rule of justice formally analogous to the maximin rule of decision), represented by the figure in L of the perfectly substitutable goods, and 3° the genuine DP. When the augmentation of inequality benefits the worse off, only (...) Pareto-strong improvements are permitted. Leximin would also permit Pareto-weak improvements too (after the first maximum D), where only the richest improves: from (2, 3) to (2, 5), say. This is forbidden by DP. With two classes, unlike Maximin, DP has no curve of indifference and is always decisive, as Leximin is. For undecisive Rules of Justice, which admit indifferent curves, I propose to add a lexically secondary rule, to break ties. That move is able to clarify the links and the differences between on the one hand Maximin alone, with its typical indifference curves in L, and on the other hand, the DP properly understood and the Leximin, which both have no indifferent curves. With two classes of persons (best off/worse off), DP appears more egalitarian than Leximin, because it's secondary rule is MinIn (Minimization of Inequality). But the intuition behind the distinction is that it cannot possible “fair” that only the best off improves in a productive social cooperation. (shrink)

If "being" is usually defined in terms of something roughly equivalent to the Aristotelian categories, are we forced to say that whatever escapes classification by these categories is to that extent beyond or above being? For instance, if "perfection" is used outside of the categories which apply to particular beings and is attributed to a first principle of all things, is "perfection" in this application so different from "perfection" as it applies within the categories that the two applications share nothing (...) in common? (shrink)