The concept of analogy by Pázmány and Suárez

Abstract

Peter Pázmány (1570-1637), the most important author of Hungarian late scholasticism lectured on Aristotle’s logic, natural philosophy and metaphysics at the Jesuit university of Graz during the academic years 1598-1600. Despite the fact that the material of his lectures on metaphysics has gone lost, his elaboration of dialectics handed down to us in manuscripts as well as his students’ printed disputations treating metaphysical themes enable us to reconstruct Pázmány’s views concerning metaphysical aequivocity, analogy and univocity. First, my paper describes Pázmány’s teaching on analogy with special emphasis on the analogy of the property of being. In a second step, Francisco Suárez’s thoughts on analogy will be introduced as they are developed in his masterpiece Disputationes metaphysicae (1597). In the third part of my paper, I make an attempt of comparing the concepts of metaphysical analogy by Pázmány and Suárez, respectively. According to the thesis of the paper, the Hungarian and Spanish philosophers’ approaches prove to be very similar; the differences between them concern mostly their different terminological framework. The paper accounts for this terminological contrast by pointing out the different receptions of Caietanus’ De nominum analogia (1497) by Pázmány and Suárez.