Are Aquinas and Whitehead Metaphorical and Analogical All the Way Down?

The 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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Open theology
Main Author: Masson, Robert (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: De Gruyter 2015
In: Open theology
Further subjects:B Cognitive Linguistics
B Thomism
B Analogy
B Religious Language
B Metaphor
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Summary:The 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.
ISSN:2300-6579
Contains:Enthalten in: Open theology
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1515/opth-2015-0033