Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) was one of the most important philosophers and theologians of Early Modern Scholasticism. Although Suárez spent most of his academic career as a professor of theology, he is better known today for his Metaphysical Disputations (Salamanca, 1597). The present volume contains a facing-page English translation of Metaphysical Disputation I, which is introductory and devoted to the nature of metaphysics itself. In it, Suárez first specifies this science’s object and nature (Sections 1 and 2) and then discusses its unity (Section 3), its end, utility and functions (Section 4), its status as the most perfect natural science and true wisdom (Section 5), and finally the thesis that it is the science most of all desired by means of a natural appetite (Section 6). Those interested in late scholastic conceptions of metaphysics and their influence on the better known metaphysical systems of the seventeenth century – e.g., Descartes’s – will find the volume especially useful. The Latin text contained in this volume introduces a significant number of corrections to the text of the Vivès edition, the one standardly used by scholars of Suárez, and thus more faithfully reproduces the text of the first edition. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction that provides a detailed survey of the disputation’s principal claims and arguments.

The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) was an eminent philosopher and theologian whose Disputationes Metaphysicae was first published in Spain in 1597 and was widely studied throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The Disputationes Metaphysicae had a great influence on the development of early modern philosophy and on such well-known figures as Descartes and Leibniz. This is the first time that Disputations 17, 18, and 19 have been translated into English. The Metaphysical Disputations provide an excellent philosophical introduction to the medieval Aristotelian discussion of efficient causality. The work constitutes a synthesis of monumental proportions: problematic issues are lucidly delineated and the various arguments are laid out in depth. Disputations 17, 18, and 19 deal explicitly with such issues as the nature of causality, the types of efficient causes, the prerequisites for causal action, causal contingency, human free choice, and chance.

This study traces the development of the metaphysics of the material world in early modern thought. It starts with the scholastic innovator Suárez, proceeds to a consideration of Suárez's connections to Descartes, and ends with an examination of Spinoza's fundamental re-conceptualization of the Cartesian material world.

The origin of transcendental thought is to be sought in medieval philosophy. This book provides for the first time a complete history of the doctrine of the transcendentals and shows its importance for the understanding of philosophy in the Middle Ages.

This volume explores the relationship between physics and metaphysics in Descartes’ philosophy. According to the standard account, Descartes modified the objects of metaphysics and physics and inverted the order in which these two disciplines were traditionally studied. This book challenges the standard account in which Descartes prioritizes metaphysics over physics. It does so by taking into consideration the historical reception of Descartes and the ways in which Descartes himself reacted to these receptions in his own lifetime. The book stresses the diversity of these receptions by taking into account not only Cartesianisms but also anti-Cartesianisms, and by showing how they retroactively highlighted different aspects of Descartes’ works and theoretical choices. The historical aspect of the volume is unique in that it not only analyzes different constructions of Descartes that emerged in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, but also reflects on how his work was first read by philosophers across Europe. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a fresh and up-to-date contribution to this important debate in early modern philosophy.

Although the importance of Francisco Suárez has been, for some time already, generally recognized even outside the circles of historians of scholasticism, the wider context of his thought – i.e., the rich and diverse Renaissance and Baroque scholasticism – remains largely unexplored. This book is an attempt to contribute to the quest of putting Suárez’s metaphysics (a mere fragment of the whole of his intellectual legacy) into context, historical and systematic. Being the fruit of an international conference held in Prague in October 2008, it puts together a systematically ordered selection of papers devoted to general and specific topics of Suárezian metaphysics, with special respect to its sources and further impact. Part One explores in the first place the notion of being and the nature of metaphysics in general; Part Two then deals with more specific metaphysical topics such as the problem of universals, causality, relations, and God. The book will be of value not just to Suárez-scholars, but to anyone interested in the history of ideas in general and in the the intricacies of metaphysical thought at the verge of modernity in particular.

Metaphysics or Ontology? treats the evolution of the object of metaphysics from being, to the concept of being, to, finally, the object (thought). Possible being must be non-contradictory, but an object of thought includes anything a human being can think, including contradictions and nothingness. When the concept of being, or object of thought, replaces existence as the object of metaphysics, it becomes something other than metaphysics—ontology, or something beyond ontology. However, ontology cannot examine existence because it only investigates concepts and possibility. Only classical metaphysics investigates reality qua reality. This book masterfully treats the history of this controversy and many other important metaphysical questions raised over the centuries

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Spanish legal culture, developed during the Spanish Golden Age, has had a significant influence on the legal norms and institutions that emerged in Europe and in Latin America. This volume examines the lives of twenty key personalities in Spanish legal history, in particular how their Christian faith was a factor in molding the evolution of law. Each chapter discusses a jurist within his or her intellectual and political context. All chapters have been written by distinguished legal scholars from Spain and around the world. This diversity of international and methodological perspectives gives the volume its unique character; it will appeal to scholars, lawyers, and students interested in the interplay between religion and law.

Central to Elements is an assay of the attributional union properties and relations have with their subjects, a topic historically left metaphorical. The work critiques eight Aristotelian assumptions concerning attribute dependence and ‘inherence’, per se subjects (‘substances’), attributes as agent-organizers, and unity-by-a-shared-one. Groups of these assumptions are seen to yield contradiction, vicious regress, or other problems. This analysis, joined with insights from an assay of ubiquitous structure, motivate ten theses explicating attribution and its primary ontic status. The theses detail: attributes proper as individuated instances, structure as instance-generated facts and their two forms of composition, the conditioning role and universal nature of instances’ component intensions, the primacy of attribute instances for generating all forms of composition and complex entities, and identity and indiscernibility criteria for the latter. Principal is the insight that attribution is intension-determined combinatorial agency. It is its systematizing implications that provide solutions to classic problems, e.g., Composition, Individuation, and Universals, and in net generate a comprehensive one-category structuralist ontology.