My project examines the philosophical use of analogical thinking, developed through an interpretation of the work of four thinkers: Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Giorgio Agamben. I argue that analogical thinking, informed by the insights of these philosophers, has a role to play in contemporary political ontology, specifically the conceptualisation and treatment of non-human animals. Drawing on Agamben’s methodological principle of entwicklungsfähigkeit - the capacity to develop a conceptual potentiality in the thought of another - I have identified and then developed a series of interpretations of analogical thinking that appear to be absent from much of the contemporary material on analogy. From Aristotle, I examine the emergence of analogy in its poetic-mathematical foundations, arguing that this originary structure of analogy reveals a capacity to draw together ostensibly distinct fields of thinking in a way that mirrors the analogical capacity to conflate incongruous domains for the purpose of ontological recategorisation. I then trace Kant’s diverse and evolving perspective on analogy, which gives me an opportunity to examine the under-appreciated importance of the power of the imagination for the use of analogical thinking; I posit that this imaginative capacity of analogy underpins a potential transgression of ontological categories that differentiate entities, in particular, the conceptual boundary that both separates humans and non-human animals and also thereby defines the treatment of non-human animals in the domain of the political. Turning to Wittgenstein, I deepen a thread first identified in Aristotle, arguing that analogical thinking provides a capacity to surface or reveal background presuppositions - which I term quasi-transcendentals, drawing on a conceptualisation in critical phenomenology put forward by Lisa Guenther. These quasi-transcendentals, I suggest, are often the foundation for the unification of diverse domains in an analogical comparison. For example, the image of a “Great Chain of Being” that underpins the hierarchisation of entities, operates, I argue, as a particularly power quasi-transcendental. Finally, I develop the analogical basis of Agamben’s political philosophy, to examine how incongruous paradigms can provide a way to see the intersection of the ontological and the political in new and destabilising ways. Drawing these ideas together, I suggest that my reappraisal of analogy can form the basis of a future research project in political ontology, one that challenges the quasi-transcendentals underpinning the moral atrocity that characterises the human use of non-human animals.
