TY - JOUR
AU - Trakakis, N.
AB - Idolatry is vehemently rejected by the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and closely connected with idolatry are certain varieties of anthropomorphism, which involve the attribution of a human form or personality to God. The question investigated in this paper is whether a highly anthropomorphic conception of God, one that commits the sin of idolatry, is entailed by a particular theory of religious language. This theory is the 'univocity thesis', the view that, for some substitutions for 'F', the sense of '___ is F' as applied to God and its sense as applied to human creatures is exactly or substantially the same. My claim is that the univocity thesis entails a strong form of anthropomorphism that in effect reduces God to creaturely status and thus succumbs to idolatry (albeit a conceptual form of idolatry). In the course of my argument, a comparison is made between, on the one hand, the methods of Duns Scotus and modern proponents of perfect-being theology in arriving at a concept of God as maximally perfect, and on the other hand the work of Thomistic philosophers (especially Barry Miller) in showing how a more adequate conception of divinity can be reached by dispensing with some of the methods and assumptions of perfect-being theology, particularly the assumption of univocity.
TI - Does Univocity Entail Idolatry?
JF - Sophia
DO - 10.1007/s11841-010-0222-4
DA - 2010-12-09
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/does-univocity-entail-idolatry-MOLCSuOuvG
SP - 535
EP - 555
VL - 49
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -