Docta Ignorantia and the Limits of Univocal Reason: The Trinitarian Paradigm as a Model of Epistemic Unity Amid Ontological Plurality

This International Conference calls for reflection on the unity of philosophy across the methodological diversity of inquiry, moving "from ontic unity to epistemic defragmentation." This paper argues that contemporary metaphilosophical fragmentation often rests on an unexamined assumption, that genuine epistemic unity requires the reduction of heterogeneous domains of reality to a single, univocal logical register, typically classical bivalent logic, inherited from the Aristotelian tradition and tacitly extended as the universal criterion of intelligibility. When this assumption is applied beyond its proper domain, two failure modes follow, either heterogeneous realities are forced into a common conceptual structure that distorts them, or the impossibility of such reduction is read as evidence that no unity is available at all, yielding the very epistemic defragmentation the conference seeks to address.

This paper proposes a third model, drawn from the apophatic tradition and tested in its most demanding case: Trinitarian theology. Following Pseudo-Dionysius's account of divine names exceeding predication [1] and Nicholas of Cusa's docta ignorantia [2], it argues that reason can achieve genuine unity with realities that exceed its proper logical register not by inhabiting them discursively, but by bordering them analogically. The Trinity functions here as a structural test case for metaphilosophy, a coherence that is neither reducible to classical identity-logic nor merely equivocal, but accessible through an analogical participation that recognises the local validity of standard logic without treating its limits as the limits of rationality as such, a structure already implicit in Aquinas's treatment of trinitarian relations and processions [3]. A suggestive analogy is drawn with the relation between classical and non-classical logics, a parallel whose philosophical stakes for theism more broadly have been explored by Swinburne [4], the failure of univocal extension does not entail irrationalism, but rather the recognition of ontologically distinct strata, each governed by its own constitutive logic.

The paper engages critically with Raimon Panikkar's claim that the Trinity constitutes a "primordial human experience" [5]. It asks whether Panikkar's argument remains comparative-phenomenological or already implies the stronger epistemological-logical thesis defended here and locates the paper's original contribution precisely at this threshold of making explicit, as a general metaphilosophical principle, what Panikkar's phenomenology of religious experience leaves largely implicit.

References

1. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names and Mystical Theology.
2. Cusanus N. De Docta Ignorantia.
3. Aquinas T. Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 27–43. 1265–1274.
4. Swinburne R. The Christian God. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1994.
5. Panikkar R. La Trinidad y la experiencia religiosa. Barcelona: Ediciones Obelisco; 1989.