The predicament of being: Analogy and the priority of inquiry

This dissertation endorses the analogy of being over against all possible univocal alternatives. These two key terms, univocity and analogy, are taken in their ontological rather than rhetorical senses. Univocity means that being is in the same way that a being is; analogy means being is in the same way and in a different way that a being is. The argument works in two parts. The first part draws on Aristotle's logical and psychological works to reconstruct what he means by an entity. Entities are not things out there that we behold with our senses and imagine in our heads. An entity is something the understanding grasps through an image. The univocity of being, the second part argues, only takes place on the basis of a specific misunderstanding of entities. If things are given concepts, the being of them all is a concept too, and thus univocal. By working to correct this misunderstanding of the act of understanding, detected both in the historical record and in contemporary works, we arrive at the non-univocity of being, in other words, the analogy of being. Because an entity is the kind of thing we understand rather than the kind of thing we sense or imagine, the meaning of being in general must be analogically related to other beings.