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

• Authors: Robert Masson
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

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.

Keywords

EN

Analogy; Cognitive Linguistics; metaphor; religious language; Thomism

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Open Theology
• Year: 2014
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1

Dates

received

2015-09-17

accepted

2015-10-09

online

2015-11-06

Contributors

author

Robert Masson

• Marquette University

References

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• McCabe, Herbert. “Creation.” In God Matters, 2-9. London: G. Chapman, 1987.
• Masson, Robert. Without Metaphor, No Saving God: Theology After Cognitive Linguistics. Leuven: Peeters Press, 2014.
• Sokolowski, Robert. The God of Faith & Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982.
• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/opth-2015-0033