Francisco Suárez

A translation of the First Disputation from Francisco Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae.

In the last several years, there has been an uptick of scholarly interest in Aristotelian theories of efficient causation. Much of this interest has focused on the late scholastic figure Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). This paper clarifies an important but neglected aspect of Suárez's theory of efficient causation—namely, his account of active causal powers. Like other Aristotelians, Suárez understands active causal powers as features that enable their subjects to perform certain sorts of actions. For example, a fire is able to heat (...) in virtue of its power or capacity for heating. However, it is not immediately clear which items in an Aristotelian ontology perform the role of an active power. The paper explains and motivates Suárez's answer to this question, and shows how this answer influences his position in a scholastic controversy about the causal roles of substantial and accidental forms in substantial change. (shrink)

Edition of the opuscules by D. Báñez on De auxiliis controversy. There is the critical edition of three manuscripts and the first Spanish annotated translation of the opuscules. The Latin text is disposed together with the translation. An introduction situates the opuscules in its systematic and historical context.

This article exposes the concept of "second" Salamanca's School, i.e. the followers of Vitoria in a second generation that teach in Salamanca during the last years of the sixteenth century and the first years of the seventeenth. The author shows that there is an important continuity among the first and the second School and revisits the aspects which have been seen as negative for the School: the developing of metaphysics and the De Auxiliis controversy. The metaphysics as such cannot be (...) considered as a negative aspect and the De Auxiliis controversy has also some positive aspects, although it supposed a fatal tendency which determined the end of the School. (shrink)

Against an interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s thought that understands the divine motion of the created will only providing a generic impulse to it, in this article is defended that God moves specifically for every good choice. This motion doesn’t prevent at all the contingency of creatures and neither freedom of choice. Is also shown how Báñez’s thought is quite faithful to Saint Thomas in this and doesn’t intend anything else but simply to make it known and defend it from (...) molinists misinterpretations. That’s why is shown that the divine motion of the will doesnt's make God responsible for sin, especially since that would only be possible if divine causality were not the action of the eternal God, who is outside the created causality. (shrink)

This book collects six unpublished and published academic studies on the thought of Francisco Suárez, which is addressed through accurate textual analyses and meticulous contextualization of his doctrines in the Scholastic debate. The present essays aim to portray two complementary aspects coexisting in the work of the Uncommon Doctor: his innovative approach and his adherence to the tradition. To this scope, they focus on some pivotal, but often neglected, topics in Suárez’s metaphysics and psychology – such as his theories of (...) cognition and truth, angelology, continuous quantity – thereby developing an original inquiry into a crucial moment in the development of Western philosophy. (shrink)

Thanks to Barbeyrac, Pufendorf and others, there is a long-familiar picture of Grotius as offering a groundbreaking account of natural law. By now there is also a familiar observation that there is no agreement what makes Grotius’s account innovative. Sometimes this leads to skepticism about how innovative Grotius’s account of natural law really is. Some scholars suggest that Grotius’s account of natural law resembles Suárez’s account. But others continue to argue that Barbeyrac is right to see Grotius as breaking the (...) ice of previous philosophy and laying the groundwork for a distinctively modern moral philosophy. I plan to contribute to the debate by arguing that, properly understood, Grotius’s position is similar to Suárez’s on a range of fundamental questions, and, furthermore, that seeing Grotius as making a radical break with the past violates his own self-conception. 1. (shrink)

Like many philosophers in the scholastic tradition, Suárez claims that we cannot cognize anything unless we use a cognitive device, a so-called intelligible species. But how can we produce such a device? And what kind of cognition does it make possible? This chapter examines these questions, paying particular attention to Suárez’s rejection of traditional theories that explained the production of intelligible species by referring to efficient causation. On his view, there can only be a relation of occasional causation: the existence (...) of sensory images is simply an occasion for the intellect to produce intelligible species. This chapter first analyzes this type of causation and then looks at the function of the species. It argues that species are inner representations that make particular things cognitively present. In presenting this view, Suárez breaks with a long tradition that took species to be the product of a process of assimilation of universal forms and paves the way for early modern theories of representation. (shrink)

Many late medieval Aristotelians assumed that a natural substance has several substantial forms in addition to matter as really distinct parts. This assumption gave rise to a unity problem: why is a substance more than a conglomeration of all these parts? This paper discusses Francisco Suárez’s answer. It first shows that he rejected the idea that there is a plurality of forms, emphasizing instead that each substance has a single form and hence a single structuring principle. It then examines his (...) account of the relationship between matter and form. While accepting the thesis that these two parts are really distinct entities, he claimed that there is a special “mode of union” that binds them together. With this account, he defended the essential unity of a natural substance, but he transformed the program of Aristotelian metaphysics: not substances, but entities and modes inside them, are now the basic building blocks of reality. (shrink)

Brentano’s introduction of the concept of intentionality into contemporary philosophy was indebted to scholastic sources. Among these, Suárez has not been sufficiently addressed, even though his idea of transcendental relation is relied upon by Brentano to describe the intentional relation. In addition, in his examination of being as truth in Suárez, Brentano manifests his assumption of the principle of immanence. Finally, this article argues that, even in his reist period, Brentano continued to understand knowledge as a relation.

This article deals with the historical position of Domingo Báñez in the De Auxiliis Controversy. He was a protagonist of the beginning of the dispute and his name was used by the defenders of Luis de Molina to describe the traditional Thomist account on divine providence and free will; even today, many Thomists use the name of Báñez to designate their own position. This article tries to determine his personal opinion regarding the ontology of physical premotion without presupposing the later (...) development of Bañecian doctrine. Most Thomists conceive it as a kind of entity inherent in the creature, but Báñez did not interpret it this way in his own account. According to him, God moves the created will so that the free human act is the first new entity in the creature, and it is produced by both God and created free will. (shrink)

This paper engages with Suárez’s writings on the origins of political power in order to ascertain whether he can be considered a social contract theorist at all. It focuses on specific details of his consent theory, namely the ‘who’, the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and the ‘what for’ of the agreements that originate government. The conclusion shows that even though his systematic treatment of contracts falls short of becoming a social contract theory in the same way as modern contractualist thinkers, he (...) can still be considered a social contract theorist in the tradition of the School of Salamanca. (shrink)

For Francisco Suárez, beings of reason are non-existent objects that we can think about, objects like goat-stags and round squares. The first section of the fifty-fourth of Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations is about the ontological status of beings of reason. Suárez’s view has been the subject of disagreement in the literature because he sometimes says that there are beings of reason, and he sometimes says there are not. In this paper, I argue for and explain an ontological pluralist reading of Suárez. (...) Ontological pluralism is the claim that there is more than one way of being. I distinguish between two varieties of ontological pluralism, strict and non-strict, and argue that Suárez endorsed the latter. In the contemporary literature, it is sometimes alleged that ontological pluralism is an idle hypothesis, unintelligible or philosophically vacuous. I argue that Suárez has a response to this objection in his argument against ontological monism. (shrink)

The late scholastic philosopher Francisco Suárez articulates and defends an extraordinarily detailed account of efficient causation. Some of the most interesting and difficult questions connected with this account concern the particular types of efficient causation he acknowledges. This paper clarifies one of the most fundamental distinctions Suárez employs in the course of his treatment of efficient causation—namely, that between motion or change, on the one hand, and creation ex nihilo, on the other. The paper shows that, although motion and creation (...) differ in systematic and important ways, they nevertheless can both be captured by Suárez’s general theoretical model of efficient causation. Moreover, the paper shows that creation serves as a kind of limit case of efficient causation, and accordingly that it informs how Suárez understands motion or change as well. (shrink)

Suárez distingue entre cuatro formas diferentes de intentar un fin de acción: con una intención actual, virtual, habitual o interpretativa. Esta distinción se repite en muchos libros y artículos en siglos posteriores como una parte estándar de la teoría de la acción, y Suárez es evidentemente la fuente de muchos de los autores posteriores. Este artículo examina el tratamiento de Suárez de la distinción. La intención interpretativa recibe la mayor atención, ya que Suárez parece dar varias caracterizaciones inconsistentes de ella (...) en diferentes obras. El artículo concluye con algunas notas sobre la posterior recepción de la distinción y comenta brevemente las lecciones que se deben aprender sobre cómo rastrear la influencia de Suárez. (shrink)

Os intérpretes discordam quanto a origem que Francisco Suárez atribui a obrigação e a sujeição política. De acordo com alguns, Suárez, como outros contratualistas, acredita que é o consentimento dos indivíduos que causa a obrigação política; outros, porém, afirmam que para Suárez a obrigação política não deriva do consentimento dos indivíduos. Em respaldo a esta tese eles invocam a opinião de Suárez de que o poder político emana da cidade por meio de “decorrência natural.” Eu argumento que a análise de (...) obras menos estudada de Suárez, como o De voto e o De iuramento, mostra que, para Suárez, o consentimento causa tanto a obrigação política da cidade e quanto a dos cidadãos. Além do mais, uma inspeção mais acurada da noção de causalidade por decorrência natural dentro da metafísica suareziana mostra que o que emana do corpo político não é, como sustentado, a sujeição e a obrigação política, mas sim o direito à autonomia da cidade. E visto que para Suárez a obrigação política se origina no consentimento, então não é errado considerá-lo um contratualista. (shrink)

This essay is drawn up to represent Francisco Suárez's system of laws. The civil law is mainly founded on the legislator's will, but this law must also be fair. The law of nations is divided into a...

It is necessarily true that water is H2O, but it is a contingent fact that there is any water at all. Water therefore seems ill suited to ground the necessary truth that water is H2O. One view traditionally attributed to Scotus and Henry of Ghent was that while water is contingent, the essence of water is necessary; hence, the essence of water can ground the so-called eternal truth that water is H2O. Francisco Suárez rejects this view on the grounds that (...) it contradicts the Christian doctrine of creation, according to which everything other than God was contingently created in time. Suárez’s own view of the eternal truths has proven elusive to commentators, but I argue that Suárez ultimately endorses a version of the view he rejects: essences ground the eternal truths. But this raises several puzzles: how is Suárez’s view distinct from the views traditionally ascribed to Scotus and Henry? How does Suárez’s view escape the argument from creation, which Suárez raises against his opponents? I argue that Suárez distinguishes between his view and his opponents’ view by saying that essences have “extrinsic being,” whereas his opponents claim that essences have “intrinsic being.” The distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic being has not received much attention, but I argue that it marks an important fault line in scholastic thinking about the ontological status of non-existents. I argue that the notion of extrinsic being can be explicated in terms of ontological pluralism and grounding. The notion of extrinsic being helps differentiate Suárez’s view from his Scotistic and Henrician opponents, and it allows Suárez to respond to the creation argument he raises against his opponents. On my reading, Suárez’s solution to the problem of eternal truths turns out to be both highly original and philosophically satisfying. (shrink)

This article intends to examine the problematic question of the ontological status of “physical premotion,” that is, the divine motion of created free will. This idea was developed by the Dominican Báñez and was strongly criticised by the Jesuit Suárez. Suárez’s description of physical premotion shows that he gradually conditioned the debate in a way which compelled to see the premotion as an entity different from the creator and the free agent. Several texts of Suárez are also reviewed in discussion (...) with a recent study of Matava. Finally, the article concludes that Báñez follows the main lines of the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas; consequently, he does not believe that the divine motion has any other effect in the world than that of the free action of the created agent. (shrink)

Firstly, this paper tackles the way in which – within the Christian context – the body qua body, as the sole locus of existence, only arises when the disparity between the mortal creature and the immortal God is highlighted, that is to say, when man is regarded as a sort of vestigium Dei instead of an imago Dei. Throughout early modernity, only theologians and philosophers who, like Servet or Da Costa, posit the mortality of the soul are capable of presenting (...) the body in all its radicality. Contrarily, the body cannot truly appear in an anthropology which, as in Suarez’s case, sticks to the model of likeness or the imago Dei up to its last consequences. In his juridical-political theory, which operates to a certain extent within the regio dissimilitudinis, an authentic body does appear – namely, the social or political one. However, he returns to the realm of likeness, and so the autonomous view of the body is obscured, when he insists on the need of indirectly submitting the political body’s mortal soul to the immortal soul of the Church’s corpus mysticum. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the theories of three representatives of Second Scholasticism, namely Francisco Suárez, sj, John Poinsot, op, and Francisco de Oviedo, sj, on the issue of the intuitive and abstractive cognition of the external senses. Based on a comparison of their theories, linked to the historical starting point of the debate in the first decades of the fourteenth century, the paper argues that the doctrinal and argumentative matrix of these authors’ texts is significantly ‘present’ in the Second Scholastics as (...) well. 1) As far as naturally produced sensation is concerned, all these authors, including Poinsot, follow the Scotistic justification of the natural infallibility of the external senses; 2) regarding the possibility of supernaturally caused objectless perception, Poinsot’s position can be labelled, surprisingly, Scotistic; 3) Suárez’s theory, although partly similar to the doctrine of the late Ockham, is an idiosyncratic stance; 4) Oviedo’s conception, even more distant from that of Ockham, can be characterized as ‘Auriolian’ and ‘Chattonian’. (shrink)

The debate on universals is, generally speaking, a well-known subject in the history of philosophy, but views on universals from the end of the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century—the object of Heider’s welcome contribution—are quite neglected. Such views are extremely sophisticated, drawing on the established traditions of Thomism and Scotism, in particular, but bringing them to a new level of technicality. Heider investigates three major positions: those of Francisco Suárez, João Poinsot, and the joint position of Bartolomeo Mastri and Bonaventura (...) Belluto. The three views are chosen to.. (shrink)

This paper examines an important but neglected topic in Suárez’s metaphysics–—namely, his theory of efficient causation. According to Suárez, efficient causation is to be identified with action, one of Aristotle’s ten highest genera or categories. The paper shows how Suárez’s identification of efficient causation with action helps to shed light on his views about the precise nature of efficient causation, and its role in his ontology. More specifically, it shows that Suárez understands efficient causation to be a distinctive or sui (...) generis type of entity, and that he thinks we must adopt this view in order to account for the facts of efficient causation. The paper also examines several objections to Suárez’s account. (shrink)

Francisco Suárez Sometimes called the "Eminent Doctor" after Paul V’s designation of him as doctor eximius et pius, Francisco Suárez was the leading theological and philosophical light of Spain’s Golden Age, alongside such cultural icons as Miguel de Cervantes, Tomás Luis de Victoria, and El Greco. Although initially rejected on grounds of deficient health … Continue reading Suárez, Francisco →.

I want to begin by expressing misgivings about a standard way of making out a claim for the dependence of morality on God, misgivings that I do not have about a somewhat less standard way of arguing for this dependence. I will then consider a guiding maxim for how to proceed along this less standard way, a maxim that I draw from Suárez’s account of the relationship between divine activity and the activity of secondary causes. I then sketch one way (...) of conceiving the dependence of morality on God that fits well with this Suarezian maxim. (shrink)

El interés por la obra filosófica del P. Francisco Suárez, de la Compañía de Jesús, está hoy más vivo que nunca. No se limita únicamente a los estudiosos españoles, sino que se extiende a otros países (como EE.UU., Francia, Alemania, Italia, etc.) donde los estudios sobre la filosofía de Suárez han adquirido una notoria relevancia. Motivo de este interés es la creciente conciencia de la modernidad de su filosofía, certificada por la recepción de no pocas de sus ideas en el (...) pensamiento Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Wolff, Kant, Hegel, e incluso de la actual fenomenología, como Zubiri y Heidegger han puesto de manifiesto. El libro consta de una presentación histórica y sistemática de la filosofía de Suárez, contenida en lo fundamental en las Disputaciones metafísicas, que fueron la primera obra que, como elaboración sistemática de metafísica, abandonaba ya la forma, habitual hasta entonces, del comentario a la Metafísica de Aristóteles. Proyectadas inicialmente como un opúsculo de filosofía preliminar a la cristología, las Disputaciones metafísicas terminarían siendo una obra monumental de la historia del pensamiento. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking book, Daniel D. Novotny explores one of the most controversial topics of Suarez's philosophy: "beings of reason." Beings of reason are impossible intentional objects, such as blindness and square-circle.

(2013). ‘The Pope and Prince of All the Metaphysicians’: Some Recent Works on Suárez. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 393-403. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2013.771251.

Despite the importance of Suárez’s defense of the freedom of the will at the threshold of early modern philosophy, his account has received scant recent attention. This paper aims partially to redress that neglect. Suárez’s position can be understood as a balancing act between desiring to attribute libertarian freedom to agents and desiring to maintain the will’s status as a rational appetite. Hence, he rejects an intellectualism that says that choices are necessitated by the intellect’s judgements (since he does not (...) think that the judgements themselves can be directly free), but affirms that only what is judged good can be chosen. (shrink)

In der Fünften metaphysischen Disputation behandelt Suárez die Definition der Individualität, das metaphysische Individuationsprinzip und das physische Individuationsprinzip der Substanzen und Akzidentien. Die Darlegung berücksichtigt einen großen Teil der damals maßgeblichen Literatur und gibt zugleich einen Eindruck von der Schulphysik des späten 16. Jahrhunderts.

In der Fünften metaphysischen Disputation behandelt Suárez die Definition der Individualität, das metaphysische Individuationsprinzip und das physische Individuationsprinzip der Substanzen und Akzidentien. Die Darlegung berücksichtigt einen großen Teil der damals maßgeblichen Literatur und gibt zugleich einen Eindruck von der Schulphysik des späten 16. Jahrhunderts.

Suárez's discussion of time in the Metaphysical Disputations is one of the earliest long treatises on time (extending over sixty pages), and includes detailed arguments supporting the view that physical actions take place within an absolute temporal reference frame. Whereas some previous thinkers, such as John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureole, had made tantalising suggestions that time exists independently of physical changes, their ideas were primarily negative theses in response to perceived problems with the dominant view that time was caused (...) by the celestial motion. Suárez, in contrast, provides a positive thesis based on his revision of traditional, Scholastic metaphysics. He argues that the ordering of earlier and later events can only be understood by conceiving events as existing within the embrace of a ?flowing and successive space? which he refers to as ?entirely necessary and immutable in its own flux? (omnino necessarium et immutabile in suo fluxu) - something at least very like an absolute temporal reference frame. Yet it would be simplistic to describe Suárez's work on time only in terms of its nascent absolutism, since for him there is a second kind of time, a more properly ?real? time, which is an accident of material being. This kind of time is ontologically tied to the most intimate existence of objects, creating a plurality of individual continua of time - one for each distinct being. He calls this kind of time ?intrinsic time? (tempus intrinsecum). Suárez's dualistic account of time, in which he proposes an ?intrinsic time?, linked to being, which exists within a second order absolute temporal reference frame, or ?imaginary succession?, forms a bridge between scholasticism and early modern philosophy providing a foundation for the work of later absolutists like Gassendi and Newton. (shrink)

Suárez held that the vital faculties of the soul are really distinct from the soul itself and each other and that they cannot causally interact. This means that he needed to account for the connections between the activities of the faculties: they both interfere with and contribute to each other’s activities. Suárez does so by giving the soul a direct causal role in these activities. This role requires the unity of the soul of a living being and Suárez used it (...) to argue against the view that a living being, in particular a human being, has more than one soul. This line of thought displays some affinity with arguments for the simplicity of the soul from the unity of consciousness. One important difference is that Suárez was talking not just about mental activities but about all vital activities. (shrink)