The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez

by Hill, Benjamin; Lagerlund, Henrik

• ISBN13: 9780199583645
• ISBN10: 0199583641
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-03-24
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suarez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age. He was the last great Scholastic thinker and profoundly influenced the thought of his contemporaries within both Catholic and Protestant circles. Suarez contributed to all fields ofphilosophy, from natural law, ethics, and political theory to natural philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology, and - most importantly - to metaphysics, and natural theology. Echoes of his thinking reverberate through the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and beyond.Yet curiously Suarez has not been studied in detail by historians of philosophy. It is only recently that he has emerged as a significant subject of critical and historical investigation for historians of late medieval and early modern philosophy. Only in recent years have small sections of Suarez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suarez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez is one of the first collections inEnglish written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suarez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suarez for years to come - as well as thehistory of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suarez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.

Author Biography

Benjamin Hill received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 2003 and has taught at the University of Western Ontario since 2005. He works mainly on John Locke and seventeenth-century metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.


Henrik Lagerlund received his PhD from Uppsala University in 1999 and is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. He has published extensively on medieval philosophy, including the monograph Modal Syllogistics in the Middle Ages (Brill, 2000). Among his edited books are Rethinking the History of Skepticism (Brill, 2010) and Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy (Ashgate, 2008). He is also the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy (Springer, 2011).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
List of Contributors	p. viii
List of Abbreviations	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Background and Influence
Suárez in a Late Scholastic Context: Anatomy, Psychology, and Authority	p. 25
Descartes and Leibniz as Readers of Suárez: Theory of Distinctions and Principle of Individuation	p. 38
Metaphysics
Shadows of Beings: Francisco Suárez's Entia Rationis	p. 57
Suárez on Continuous Quantity	p. 75
Natural Philosophy
Suárez on Propinquity and the Efficient Cause	p. 89
Suárez's Last Stand for the Substantial Form	p. 101
Mind and Psychology
Suárez, Immortality, and the Soul's Dependence on the Body	p. 121
Suárez on Self-Awareness	p. 137
Unity in the Multiplicity of Suárez's Soul	p. 154
Ethics and Natural Law
Reason and Obligation in Suarez	p. 175
Suárez and Natural Law	p. 209
Bibliography	p. 230
Index	p. 291
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