Joel Gunn-Glazebrook

In this investigation, I present a critical, comparative, and creative analysis of philosophical perspectives on analogy, developing, through the examination of four signal thinkers in the Western tradition, potentialities of analogical thinking that are currently underappreciated in the field of philosophical methodology. I construct a picture of analogy that reveals a tensional potentiality of creativity and poetic expression combined with a determining, quasi-mathematical approach to thought. This approach allows for a critical identification of presuppositions – what I refer to as quasi-transcendentals (Foucault, 2024/1978; Guenther, 2019) – that challenge political-ontological configurations, such as the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals. This capacity to identify “enlightening likeness” (Hacking, 2013, p. 434) across diverse domains provides the space for a creative way to reimagine this political ontology. In chapters 2 and 3, I consider Aristotle’s use of analogy, which ranges over his extant corpus, from his logical texts, through his biological examinations, across his metaphysical, ethical, and political treatments, and in his focus on the arts of both rhetoric and poetry. It is in the first and the last of these categories – the logical-mathematical and the creative-poetic – where Aristotle most clearly theorises philosophical analogy, and he does so in a way that draws attention to the simultaneously unified and bifurcated quality of the mathematical and the creative in the operation of analogy. In chapters 4 and 5, I examine Immanuel Kant’s focus on analogy as an element of reasoning or logic as a philosophical heuristic. This demotion to the merely heuristic is fundamentally challenged by Michèle Le Dœuff (2002/1989), who argues that the use of imagery in Western philosophy, in tropes such as analogy, is intrinsic to the philosophical projects of canonical thinkers. Kant’s reservation regarding “mere analogy” in his earlier works gives way to a conceptualisation of analogy as fundamental to our understanding of how reason relates to perception (in the Critique of Pure Reason, 1781/1787), and widens substantially in the last of the critiques, the Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), where he provides grounds for seeing analogy as fundamental to our imaginative unification of the domains of aesthetic appreciation, practical reasoning, and the understanding of the world itself. In chapters 6 and 7, I consider Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of analogies, which draws on imagined domains to isolate important features of a description or problem; analogy is a way – analogous to Kant’s description in the third Critique – to see the world in a particular manner, to unlock aspects of the world that were somehow hidden from view. This ability to transform our way of seeing the world – to take hold of our capacity to shift our orientation of how the world appears, and its range of potentialities if we alter this way of seeing – as well as Wittgenstein’s novel syncretistic style of using analogical thinking, is what I elaborate as his central contribution. In chapters 8 and 9, I consider the work of Giorgio Agamben, a thinker who, more directly than in the work of the preceding philosophers, theorises and utilises a role for analogical thinking, via his adaptation of the use of paradigmatic exemplars. Agamben sees the analogical connections between diverse domains as central to his method to identify hidden normative and cultural presuppositions – what I term quasi-transcendental rules or frames – that operate in a variety of domains. In addition, Agamben demonstrates that the thinking into being of the subject in contemporary society and its relation to the political, can be critically accessed by means of analogical thinking. Creatively developing the tendencies latent and explicit in the analogical use of these four thinkers, I suggest four methodological virtues for analogical thinking in philosophy: the intricate relationship between poetry and mathematics that underpins the creative and productive tension at the centre of analogy; the fundamental implication of imagination in our ability to conceptualise the world through the unification of diverse domains; the creative capacity of analogical thinking to reveal presuppositions and affect a new way of seeing; and, the role of analogy in our ability to critically appraise the presuppositions or quasi-transcendentals that underpin the relationship between being and the political.