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Full-Text Articles in Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion
The Conceptual Priority Of The Perfect, Matthew Peter Zdon
The Conceptual Priority Of The Perfect, Matthew Peter Zdon
Dissertations (1934 -)
The doctrine of the conceptual priority of the perfect (CPP) is the claim that the concept of the perfect is prior to that of the imperfect insofar as possessing the latter presupposes a grasp of the former, but not vice versa. The goals of this study are to provide an account and defense of the Cartesian argument for CPP, to determine the consequences of this priority for the relationship between our concepts of human and divine properties, and to explore its implications for bottom-up accounts of theological concept formation. I argue that the predicates “perfect” or “infinite” in Descartes’ version …
Are Aquinas And Whitehead Metaphorical And Analogical All The Way Down?, Robert Masson
Are Aquinas And Whitehead Metaphorical And Analogical All The Way Down?, Robert Masson
Theology Faculty Research and Publications
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 …