Hasdai Crescas on Univocity, Equivocity, and Analogy

One of the major disputes of medieval Jewish philosophy was over the status of terms -- 'knowledge' was the major one -- that could be applied to God; it is, indeed, partly through the influence of Maimonides that this became an issue for Christians as well. Maimonides had argued that terms like 'knowledge', when applied to both God and creatures, are equivocal, homonymous. This raised some questions, and Gersonides, far more of an Aristotelian, later argued that this is impossible (his criticism of Maimonides is far more severe than, say, Aquinas's); he argued that since we must be affirming or denying something of God, and not just playing with names, we must say instead that terms like 'knowledge' are said of God and creatures by way of priority and posteriority, i.e., analogically. This in turn receives a critical response from Hasdai Crescas, who provides an interesting argument for it:

Let us preface our remarks with the statement that it is necessary that the term 'knowledge' not be said of Him (God), and us, by priority and posteriority. For a term said of things by priority and posteriority requires that its notion be the same. For if the intended notions were different, then they could not have priority and posteriority. For they would have nothing in common save the name. This is self-evident. Let us take, for example, 'exists,' which is said of substance and of the other categories by priority and posteriority. The term 'exists' signifies in the various cases the same notion, for its intention is 'existence' and 'being,' which is udnerstood as the same notion in all cases; the difference is only in the priority and psoteriority. For existence and being belong to the other categories by virtue of their belonging to substance. (210)

Thus he goes on to argue that Rabbi Moses, not Rabbi Levi, was right: names and terms like 'knowledge' apply to God and creatures equivocally. This does not, as he points out, mean that there is nothing about the term that applies analogically -- negative terms can be analogical, and positive terms can be analogical to the extent that they are re-interpreted as negative, so that 'non-ignorance' is said of God and creatures by priority and posteriority. But positive terms like 'knowledge', insofar as they really are positive, are applied only equivocally.

It's interesting that on the same essential topic (due to the fact that Maimonides is a shared influence, there are even overlaps of argument), the big dispute among Christians about positive terms said of God and creatures is chiefly whether they are analogical or univocal; whereas the big dispute among Jews is chiefly whether they are equivocal or analogical. Likewise, it's interesting that Christians who argue that the names can be univocal do so in order, as they see it, to save reasoning about God, while Jews who argue that the names are equivocal do so in order to break the same. Crescas is quite clear about this; he says that Maimonides argues for equivocity in order to refute philosophical deviations from Torah on such subjects as whether God knows particular, future, or contingent things: "For the foundation of all these doubts is the analogy between His knowledge and our knowledge" (208). The idea is to argue that we cannot conclude anything about God's knowledge based purely on reasoning from our own knowledge, except the pious conclusions that it's inappropriate to call God ignorant, and that, whatever it may be, God's non-ignorance has to be better than our non-ignorance.

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Quotations are from Medieval Jewish Philosophical Writings, Manekin, ed. Cambridge UP (New York: 2007).