Aquinas and Analogy

In his Cajetan introduced a spurious distinction between analogy of attribution and analogy of proportionality that is not found in Aquinas's writings or anywhere else. Cajetan's mistake became a commonplace and it is still uncritically accepted today. In Ralph McInerny carefully traces the source of the confusion to Cajetan's misunderstanding of a text from Aquinas's commentary on the Sentences and shows how unwarranted and how misleading that distinction is. Another source of confusion has been the attempt to equate the Greek word analogia and its Latin equivalent to try to find word for word correspondences between Aristotle and Aquinas. For instance, what Thomas calls analogy of names is consonant rather with what Aristotle describes as legetai pollachôs, what "is said in many ways." McInerny brings in all relevant texts and analyzes the points they make, and he makes comparisons with the famous notion of focal meaning used by the Oxford philosopher G.E.L. Owen.