Identidad y unidad: la analogía del ente en De principiis naturae 6 y sus fuentes

In De princ. nat. 6 Aquinas presents a classification of the four main senses in which two things, or their inner principles, may be considered identical: according to number, to species, to genus, and by analogy. In reviewing the sources on which it is being founded, which are primarily Aristotle’s chapter on the ‘one’ in Metaphys. V 6 and, secondarily, Avicenna and Averroes’ commentaries, we find that in the first instance, Aquinas leaves aside a great variety of more complex distinctions present in those commentaries. The presentation of Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Avicenna, and Averroes’s expositions will allow us to establish the degree to which Aquinas depends on them in his presentation of the analogy’s doctrine, given that Aquinas uses the synthetic version of the classification of the ‘one’ in the exposition, but recurs to the other divisions proposed by Aristotle and his commentators in the explanation.