ABSTRACT
Both Ricoeur in The Rule of Metaphor (1978a) and Hausman in Metaphor
and Art (1989) draw on Kantian ontology to explain how a metaphor can
create new yet appropriate meaning. Hausman, on the one hand, explains
new metaphorical meaning by the direct proposal of an ontology. This is
made up of unique, extraconceptual particulars akin to Kant’s things in
themselves which, Hausman maintains, stand as the referents of inventive
metaphors and, therefore, as the items which guarantee their appropriate-
ness. Ricoeur, on the other hand, turns indirectly to ontology via an allusion to Kant and the transcendental functioning of the mind which
determines, prior to experience, the ontological order of the world. Ricoeur
suggests that new metaphorical meaning is achieved as a result of the ten-
sion between creative and claim-making discourses where the operation of
the latter proceeds ‘from the very structures of the mind, which it is the task
of transcendental philosophy to articulate’ (1978a: 300).
