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70Portraying analogy (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1981.The attention of philosophers. linguists and literary theorists has been converging on the diverse and intriguing phenomena of analogy of meaning:the different though related meanings of the same word, running from simple equivocation to paronymy, metaphor and figurative language. So far, however, their attempts at explanation have been piecemeal and inconclusive and no new and comprehensive theory of analogy has emerged. This is what James Ross offers here. In the first full treatment of the su…Read more
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55An impasse on competing descriptions of GodInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4). 1977.
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134The Crash of Modal MetaphysicsReview of Metaphysics 43 (2). 1989.Mistakes about necessity, possibility, counterpossibility and impossibility distort the notions of being and creation.1 Recently such errors cluster in the understanding of quantified modal logic (QML), a device that was for a while thought especially promising for metaphysics.2 Time has told a different story. The underlying modal platonism is gratuitous, without explanatory force and conflicts with the religion it is often used to explain. There are things to consider here that go beyond diagn…Read more
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40The notion of rational certainty[1] had developed a long way in four decades. Many now recognize that even to do science we characteristically claim rational certainty where we lack supporting proof of our own, have not engaged in some balancing of evidence, and have not even undertaken any articulate inquiry. Many further recognize that rational reliance is notably voluntary[2]and that our feelings, especially refined feelings, have indispensable roles in determining our willing reliances and i…Read more
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137Scotus’ natural theology has distinctive claims: (i) that we can reason demonstratively to the necessary existence and nature of God from what is actually so; but not from imagined situations, or from conceivability-to-us; rather, only from the possibility logically required for what we know actually to be so; (ii) that there is a univocal transcendental notion of being; (iii) that there are disjunctive transcendental notions that apply exclusively to everything, like ‘contingent/necessary,’ and…Read more
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22Adapting AquinasProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 78 41-58. 2004.This paper enlarges the analogy of meaning doctrine to show that it is a general, law-like linguistic phenomenon, and not peculiar to philosophy. The theory of forms, considered as active, repeatable, intelligible structures of things (accessible as such to intelligent beings alone), is basic to ground the sciences of nature and to an account of knowledge. Aquinas’s accounts of real natures, universals, natural and angelic things, causation, abstraction, knowledge, etc. are grounded in the theor…Read more
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