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‘The Pope and Prince of All the

Metaphysicians’: Some Recent
Works on Suárez
a
Sydney Penner
a
Merton College , University of Oxford
Published online: 26 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Sydney Penner (2013) ‘The Pope and Prince of All the
Metaphysicians’: Some Recent Works on Suárez, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, 21:2, 393-403, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2013.771251

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 British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2013
Vol. 21, No. 2, 393–403, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2013.771251

R EVIEW A RTICLE

‘THE POPE AND PRINCE OF ALL THE

METAPHYSICIANS’: SOME RECENT WORKS
ON SUÁREZ

Sydney Penner
Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund: The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez.
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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 294. £45.00 (hb). ISBN
9780199583645.

Daniel Schwartz: Interpreting Suárez: Critical Essays. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 2012, pp. 218. £50.00 (hb). ISBN 9780521509657.

Marco Sgarbi: Francisco Suárez and His Legacy: The Impact of Suárezian
Metaphysics and Epistemology on Modern Philosophy. Series: Metafisica e
storia della metafisica. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2010, pp. 294. €25.00 (pb).
ISBN 9788834319956.

John P. Doyle: Collected Studies on Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617).

Edited by Victor M. Salas. Series: Ancient and Medieval Philosophy,
Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2011, pp. 416. €69.50 (hb). ISBN
9789058677372.

The pre-eminent philosopher from the Golden Age of Spain, Francisco

Suárez (1548–1617), provides an excellent illustration of how a philoso-
pher’s reputation can be subject to the vagaries of fortune. Suárez was
already well regarded during his lifetime and his reputation flourished in
the decades after his death. His many works were reprinted frequently all
over Europe and Suárezian philosophy was taught at many of the continent’s
schools. Most historians of early modern philosophy recognize that Suárez
was influential. Descartes and Leibniz mention him explicitly; putative
traces of his thought are ubiquitous. But the real extent of his influence is
still invisible since the philosophical tradition that he most influenced –
early modern scholasticism – is not well known. Suárez was no more the
‘last scholastic’ than were any of the numerous earlier philosophers who
have misguidedly been given this honorific. Once we pay attention, we
easily find thousands of pages of detailed discussion of Suárez’s arguments

© 2013 BSHP
 394 SYDNEY PENNER

by such philosophers as Rodrigo de Arriaga (1592–1667), John Punch

(1603–1661), and Claude Frassen (1620–1711), all capable philosophers
not deserving their present neglect.
Then Suárez’s influence waned. To the descendants of canonical early
modern philosophers, such as Descartes and Locke, Suárez’s massive
tomes with their exhaustive cataloguing of every medieval view on countless
philosophical and theological questions – knowledge of the significance of
which had often long disappeared – were exemplary of the ‘mazes of
subtle speculations’, ‘as fruitless a labour, as that of tracing elves and
fairies in their midnight gambols’, for which the scholastics were reviled
(Enfield, The History of Philosophy, 385–6). To Protestants, Suárez was a
staunch Counter-Reformation defender of Roman Catholicism; Suárez’s
famous defence of the occasional permissibility of tyrannicide occurred,
after all, in a work entitled A Defence of the Catholic Faith that was
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written as a response to the Protestant James I of England. Among Roman

Catholics themselves, the tide turned in the nineteenth century to a
Thomism that tended to see modernism as a perversion of true philosophy
and Suárez as the straying disciple of Thomas who set the stage for this
perversion.
With so many reasons to dislike Suárez, it is hardly surprising that by the
time we had got to the twentieth century, he had fallen so far from grace that
the number of English-language books focused on Suárez could be counted
on one hand.
These four new books make evident that Suárez’s fortunes are now rising
again, a fact greatly pleasing to those who doubt the philosophical merit of
the reasons for Suárez’s neglect. In addition to the welcome translations pub-
lished in recent years, four new books with substantial English content that
focus on Suárez have come out in the last two years.1 Several additional
books are in preparation, so those interested in Suárez can anticipate even
more riches. Given the previous neglect, so much interest is a remarkable
event. The philosophical quality of the discussion is also gratifying, since
work on a new subject, not having the benefit of sophisticated interlocutors
to hand, often fails to fully realize the potential philosophical rewards. And,
to be sure, that Suárez studies are less mature than, for example, Descartes
studies is evident in these books. But it should be emphasized at the
outset that the work in these books bears surprisingly few marks of being
early forays into a field. The best work in these books is very good work
indeed.
All four volumes are collections of papers, with all the concomitant virtues
and vices of that form. The only volume with something of a thematic thread
running through many of its papers is John P. Doyle’s Collected Studies on
Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548–1617). Doyle has devoted much of his career

1
Suárez has traditionally received somewhat more attention from French, German, and
Spanish scholars, but for the present review I am focusing on work written in English.
 SOME RECENT WORKS ON SUÁREZ 395

to studying Suárez, producing several valuable translations and a series of

papers that display a mastery of Suárez’s enormous corpus that few can
hope to equal. Although these papers have been published before, having
them collected in one volume is convenient and makes more evident the
breadth and richness of his work on Suárez. Doyle’s focus, motivated by
his concerns as a Gilsonian Thomist, is on a cluster of metaphysical
issues, such as the analogy of being, possible being, and beings of reason,
but he also has several essays in practical philosophy, including an essay
in which he traces the modern notion of human rights back to, before
Locke, Suárez.
One of the most rewarding features of Doyle’s work is its ability to engage
with a broad range of texts. Most papers on Suárez, even if sophisticated in
other ways, betray the immaturity of the field by selecting one section of text
from Suárez and discussing it with nary a mention of any other texts that
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might have a bearing on the issue at hand. Given the amount of text that
Suárez left behind and the state of Suárez scholarship, such a strategy is
no doubt necessary for most authors. Doyle, however, is familiar with a
broad range of Suárez’s texts. Furthermore, he knows Suárez’s scholastic
contemporaries well. It may not be surprising that Doyle’s strength comes
with a less welcome flip side. Doyle is so at home among the late scholastics
that he himself tends to speak their language. As a result, readers unfamiliar
with the scholastic tradition who hope to find illumination by reading sec-
ondary literature that will translate the scholastic philosophy into contempor-
ary idioms will likely be frustrated. But for readers who already have some
familiarity with scholastic philosophy, there is much here from which to
profit. The volume is a fitting tribute to a scholar who has perhaps done
more work on Suárez and other late scholastic philosophers than anyone
else alive in the English-speaking world.
Francisco Suárez and His Legacy, edited by Marco Sgarbi, contains six
English papers, as well as one Spanish and five Italian papers. The strength
of the volume is in providing historical context and tracing Suárez’s sub-
sequent influence. Especially refreshing is the attention to figures that are
often neglected by historians of philosophy. If one is looking for close analy-
sis and reconstruction of arguments, however, most of the papers in this
volume are less useful. Some of the English papers could also have benefited
from copy editing by someone fully fluent in the language.
Given that this volume will be more difficult to track down in English
libraries, I will briefly survey the papers most likely to interest present
readers so they can determine whether to make the effort. Victor Salas
suggests in ‘Francisco Suárez: End of the Scholastic ἐπιστήμη?’ that
Suárez plays a pivotal role in the history of philosophy by arguing that in
order to learn about the objective concept of being, we should attend to
the formal concept, given that it is better known to us. Since a formal
concept is the mental act through which the corresponding objective
concept is known or represented, Salas suggests that Suárez’s method
 396 SYDNEY PENNER

marks the beginning of modern subjectivism. In ‘Francisco Suárez and the

rationes studiorum of the Society of Jesus’, Marco Forlivesi shows how a
variety of features of Suárez’s writing can be explained by his attempt to
conform to the Jesuit order’s prescriptions to its members. The essay
helps illuminate Suárez’s complicated relationship to his self-proclaimed
guide, Thomas Aquinas. Anna Tropia’s ‘Suárez as a Scotist: The Portrait
of the Doctor Eximius in Losada’s Commentary on the Soul’ helpfully
demonstrates Suárez’s continuing influence in the eighteenth century by
examining how his epistemology is portrayed by the Jesuit Luis de
Losada. On the subject of Suárez’s influence, a number of scholars on the
European continent have claimed to find a strong Suárezian heritage in
Christian Wolff. In his paper, ‘Francisco Suárez and Christian Wolff: A
Missed Intellectual Legacy’, Marco Sgarbi examines all the passages in
which Wolff mentions Suárez and argues that, while Wolff clearly uses
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Suárez as a source, their metaphysical projects are radically different

since they have different understandings of key notions, such as essence,
being, and existence. Finally, in ‘Tota sua entitate: Suárez and Leibniz on
Individuation’, Stefano di Bella provides a subtle and illuminating examin-
ation of the legacy of Suárez’s account of individuation on Leibniz’s evol-
ving account of it. This is one of the most philosophically rewarding papers
in the volume and may be profitably read in conjunction with Roger Ariew’s
paper on Descartes and Leibniz as readers of Suárez in The Philosophy of
Francisco Suárez.
This volume, edited by Benjamin Hill and Henrik Lagerlund, (henceforth:
HL) and Interpreting Suárez, edited by Daniel Schwartz, (henceforth:
Schwartz) are in many respects alike. Most papers in both volumes are
written in the language of analytic historians of philosophy. Most papers
aim to provide careful exposition and criticism of some part of Suárez’s phil-
osophy rather than tracing historical lines of influence. When lines of influ-
ence are mentioned, they are almost exclusively suggestions of some
Suárezian influence on one of the canonical early modern philosophers
(not surprising given that a number of the authors are specialists in those
early modern figures). With one or two exceptions, post-Suárezian scholasti-
cism is completely ignored.2 The editors of both volumes solicited papers on

2
Thomas Pink briefly discusses John Punch’s account of natural law and notes his criticism of
Suárez’s account: HL, 190, fn. 22. I would have been interested in a more extended discussion
of Punch’s criticism. In most cases, the inattention to the later scholastics does little harm, but
in some cases engagement might have been fruitful. For example, Suárez’s lengthy account of
beings of reason (entia rationis) sparked much discussion in later scholastic philosophy, even
though extrascholastic philosophers tended to dismiss beings of reason as just one more of the
useless abstractions of the scholastics. I suspect Christopher Shields’ lovely essay on Suárez
on beings of reason in HL would have been even finer had he engaged with some of those later
scholastic critiques of Suárez’s position. For interested readers, Daniel Dominik Novotný pro-
vides an excellent introduction to post-Suárezian discussions of beings of reason in Novotný,
“Prolegomena to a Study”, 117–41.
 SOME RECENT WORKS ON SUÁREZ 397

a wide range of topics from Suárez’s philosophy, from metaphysics to

natural philosophy, to philosophy of mind (the last better represented in
HL), to philosophy of religion, to moral philosophy, and to political philos-
ophy (the last better represented in Schwartz). There is, however, strikingly
little overlap between the two volumes. The exceptions are two papers on
substantial form (by Helen Hattab in HL and Christopher Shields in
Schwartz) and a paper on practical reason and obligation by Thomas Pink
in each volume (in this case, the papers duplicate significant chunks of
material). Terence H. Irwin’s paper on obligation and natural law in
Schwartz focuses on obligation in a way that none of the other papers do,
but bears on some of the material in the two papers by Pink. Other than
that, most papers focus on issues left entirely untouched by any of the
other papers in either volume. In case it was needed, this bears witness to
the breadth of topics to be found in Suárez’s writings, especially once one
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realizes how many topics are left unexplored by either volume.3

The most important feature the two volumes have in common is the con-
sistently high quality of the papers (the Schwartz volume may have a slight
edge on the consistency part). They set a new standard for Suárez scholar-
ship. Given their high quality and their greater accessibility for contempor-
ary philosophers, I will focus on these two volumes for the remainder of this
essay. I expect that they will quickly become the standard first stops for scho-
lars interested in learning more about Suárez.
There is one clear difference between the two volumes. HL provide valu-
able bibliographies of both the primary and secondary literature that are a
great deal more comprehensive than the bibliographies in Schwartz. In fact,
Schwartz fails even to cite the best editions of Suárez’s work, especially
since the cited 1965 Olms edition is not actually a facsimile of the 1597
edition of Disputationes metaphysicae but of the less reliable edition
found in volumes 25–26 of the 1856–78 Opera omnia. The first editions
generally provide more reliable texts than any of the later editions, since
little of Suárez’s corpus is available in critical edition. These first editions
used to be almost impossible to find outside the Iberian Peninsula, but
many have now been scanned and made available online. HL provide
URLs for some of these scans, though the list inevitably is far from
complete.
Readers somewhat familiar with the secondary literature on Suárez will
note the absence from both volumes of any sustained discussion of a
cluster of related issues in metaphysics that have traditionally been the
subject of much dispute: being, essence, and existence. Étienne Gilson and

3
For example, there is little in these volumes about Suárez’s accounts of modes, causation,
truth, ultimate ends, and virtue. With the exception of Bernie Cantens excellent paper on
Suárez’s cosmological argument in Schwartz, Suárez’s large body of work in philosophical
theology is left untouched. Another way of making the point is to note that almost all of
the references in these papers are to six of the twenty-six volumes in Suárez’s Opera omnia.
 398 SYDNEY PENNER

Martin Heidegger both assigned Suárez a pivotal role in their histories of

philosophy on the basis of his views on these matters.4 Gilson, for
example, thinks that there are four fundamental traditions in metaphysics,
distinguished by the way Being is understood. The two relevant traditions
for our purposes are essentialism and existentialism. These terms have
been used in unhelpfully many ways, but in the Gilsonian sense essentialism
is a position that privileges essence over existence, while existentialism pri-
vileges the act of existing. In Gilson’s story, Thomas Aquinas has the dis-
tinction of being the philosopher who managed to resist the allures of
metaphysical sin and so recognizes Being as the very act of existing and
metaphysics as the science of Being qua Being. Suárez, however, is the para-
digmatic essentialist in whose philosophy existence is emptied of signifi-
cance and metaphysics becomes the science of essences. Furthermore,
Suárez stands at the threshold of modernity, bequeathing his essentialism
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to modern philosophy, especially via Wolff and Kant. Hence, the ills of
modern philosophy – such as idealism and scepticism, which purportedly
arise from essentialism – can be traced back to Suárez. Unsurprisingly,
such rousing accounts by Gilson and Heidegger have elicited a substantial
literature, especially from defenders of Suárez.
Hardly a trace of this discussion can be found in either HL or in Schwartz.5
The absence is especially notable in the case of HL, since Hill says in his
introduction that the question of whether Suárez is one of the last medieval
philosophers or one of the first early modern philosophers has been a
‘guiding principle’ of their volume (p. 5). Yet that question about classifi-
cation is usually linked to the aforementioned metaphysical issues (see
Miner, “Suarez as Founder of Modernity”, 17–36; Blanchette, “Suárez and
the Latent Essentialism”, 3–19). The claim is that Suárez inaugurates a
‘new science of ontology’, as one author puts it, which leaves him radically
at odds with the metaphysical picture that typified the medieval period. If
these metaphysical issues are ignored, it becomes harder to see why one
would have ever thought that Suárez was a modern philosopher in a substan-
tive, rather than merely chronological, sense. After saying that the classifica-
tory question was a guiding principle, Hill says:

we believe it to be in a sense unanswerable because it is a false dichotomy .…

Suárez [is] a transitional figure, partly medieval and partly modern …, pigeon-
holing a thinker into a rigid category tends to obscure as much of her thought
as it tends to illuminate.
(p. 5)

4
For an account that compares the readings of Suárez offered by Heidegger and Gilson, see
Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, ch. 3. Gilson’s assessment of Suárez can be found in his
Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 96–120.
5
Gordley’s paper in HL makes some use of this literature, but his focus is on natural law rather
than directly on the metaphysical issues themselves.
 SOME RECENT WORKS ON SUÁREZ 399

This amounts to an implicit rejection of the pictures of Suárez’s place in the

history of philosophy drawn by Gilson and others.6 I am sympathetic to
Hill’s historiographical position, and furthermore, I think there may be
good reason to redirect some attention from questions about essence and
existence to the myriad other philosophical issues that Suárez raises. Still,
given the amount of attention traditionally accorded the issue, it would
have been nice to see at least one paper dedicated to explaining just what
the essentialist-existentialism dispute is about, why one should – or should
not – consider Suárez an essentialist, and why one should – or should not
– think that essentialism has the various dire implications sometimes attrib-
uted to it.
The omission of a discussion of essentialism is no doubt related to
another omission. Very few of the papers in either volume engage signifi-
cantly with the traditional secondary literature on Suárez. HL’s comprehen-
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sive bibliography makes the omission easy to spot. The papers in HL cite
only one of the 163 books and papers by the eleven authors in their bibli-
ography that have ten or more works to their name. There are a handful of
references to these works in the papers by Schwartz. In no case is there sub-
stantive engagement with the cited work.7 I do not want to make more of
this omission than is warranted. Most of this secondary literature is not in
English and it is from intellectual traditions animated by different concerns
than those animating most of the contributors to these volumes. Further-
more, much of the literature on Suárez is not of as high a quality as the
ancient and early modern literature that is the usual home for many of
the contributors. In other words, the rewards of engagement may reason-
ably have been deemed too small for the high costs. Freedom from enga-
ging the traditional literature no doubt also contributed to the refreshing
directness of many of these papers and to the readiness to pursue new direc-
tions of enquiry. Still, the lack of engagement surely warrants a raised
eyebrow.
There are too many papers in these volumes to discuss all in a useful way,
so I will discuss only a few of them. The selection reflects neither merit nor
demerit.
Two criticisms of Suárez that one hears frequently from Thomist critics is
a charge of essentialism on the side of metaphysics and a charge of a static
negativism that does not sufficiently heed human flourishing on the side of

6
As is often the case, Gilson actually provides a somewhat more nuanced case than is usually
attributed to him, whether by friend or foe.
7
Here is a list of the authors with ten or more works in the bibliography in HL, with the
numbers in parentheses indicating the number of mentions between HL and Schwartz: Salva-
dor Castellote Cubells (0), Jean-Paul Coujou (0), Rolf Darge (1), John P. Doyle (0), Eleuterio
Elorduy (0), Constantino Esposito (0), Jorge Gracia (7), José Hellin (0), Rainer Specht (1), and
Norman J. Wells (1). Mere citations in a footnote are counted; references to editions and trans-
lations of Suárez are not.
 400 SYDNEY PENNER

moral philosophy. In an admirably ambitious paper in HL, James Gordley

aims to connect the criticisms. He accepts them as finding a mark in
Suárez, but nevertheless, he deems Suárez’s philosophy an impressive intel-
lectual achievement and thinks that Suárez, unlike many of his contempor-
aries, provides a metaphysics that justifies his natural law. Unfortunately,
Gordley’s paper strikes me as an instance of being led astray by paying
too much heed to the secondary literature.8 Suárez has resources to resist
the criticism of his metaphysics by Gilson and the criticisms of his natural
law theory by John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Pauline Westerman.9
Since Gordley’s paper builds on those criticisms, it can also be resisted.
I will not go through all the points at which one might wish to object to
Gordley’s picture, but I will comment on one area related to the charge of
negativism. A standard question for scholastic philosophers is whether the
precepts of natural law can change. Aquinas answers the question in
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Summa theologiae IaIIae.94.5, where he says that the primary principles

are wholly unchangeable, but that the secondary principles can be changed
in some special circumstances. So, to use the classic case, the principle
that one should return deposits does not apply if the deposit is a sword
and the depositor has gone mad. Suárez agrees that one need not always
return deposits, but argues in De legibus II.13 that strictly speaking, all pre-
cepts of the natural law are unchangeable. The written principle ‘a deposit
must be returned’ is simply shorthand for a principle that has the various cir-
cumstances and limitations built into it, shorthand, because a complete state-
ment in human language of all that is built into the precept is not possible
(II.13.6). On the face of it, Aquinas and Suárez disagree here. Gordley con-
siders the disagreement indicative of deep differences between their moral
theories. It is not so clear to me that the disagreement is substantive. After
all, Suárez offers reasons for his account that Aquinas might well find com-
pelling (II.13.2–6) and explicitly offers a reasonable interpretation of what
Aquinas meant when he said that secondary precepts are changeable
(II.13.7). Be that as it may, Gordley takes Suárez’s position to lead to an
unappealing negativism. The argument is straightforward. Since the precepts
are unchangeable, they must take into account all relevant circumstances,
actual and possible. Therefore, the precepts must take into account an infinite
number of circumstances, or they must be such that only a limited number of
circumstances are relevant. So far so good. But Gordley then argues that
Suárez goes for the second conjunct. And precepts, such that only a
limited number of circumstances are relevant, inevitably are according to
Gordley, ‘negative and minimalist’ (p. 221). It is not clear, however, that

8
Yes, I know that I also raise a worry about paying too little heed to the secondary literature,
but that merely shows that one can fail on either side of a mean.
9
Westerman concedes in a more recent paper that her earlier assessment of Suárez was unduly
harsh: Westerman, “Suárez and the Formality of Law”, 227–37. Unfortunately, this paper is
less well known than her earlier book and Gordley does not cite it.
 SOME RECENT WORKS ON SUÁREZ 401

Suárez would be unhappy with precepts that take into account an infinite
number of circumstances. Gordley’s case to the contrary is weak, as it
relies at crucial points on arguments from omission. Furthermore, one
might take Suárez’s claim that such precepts cannot be fully spelled out in
a human way precisely to suggest that he thinks the number of circumstances
infinite. There are questions, to be sure, of how Suárez thinks agents can
know such complex precepts and how they are to figure in deliberation.
But so far the charge of negativism has yet to be substantiated.
In Schwartz, Terence Irwin demonstrates the value of close reading in an
examination of Suárez’s views on obligation. He makes a compelling case
for heeding Suárez’s distinction between obligation (obligatio) and duty
(debitum), something that neither translators nor commentators have
always done. On Suárez’s view there is natural goodness and badness inde-
pendent of God’s will that is sufficient to give rise to duties, i.e. to make it the
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case that agents ought to do some things and to refrain from doing other
things. Failing to heed one’s duties is blameworthy. But none of this is
equivalent to saying that something is obligatory. Obligation, according to
Suárez is tied to natural law, and law requires the command of a superior
to be genuine law. So although Suárez is not a thoroughgoing voluntarist
about natural law, he is a voluntarist about obligation when distinguished
as something narrower than oughts in general.
Thomas Pink, in two rich papers, focuses less on Suárez exegesis than on
developing a scholastic model of practical reason, freedom, and obligation to
which he is sympathetic and which he thinks stands in profound contrast to a
modern model with roots in Hobbes and Locke. According to Pink, central to
the scholastic model is a distinction between legal obligation that is a reason-
giving feature added to prescribed actions through something like fear of
punishment, and moral obligation that is a special kind of justificatory
force identified by practical reason in actions themselves without the
addition of any further features, such as fear of punishment. Moral obligation
addresses a metaphysically free will and demands the performance of the
obligatory actions. Failing to perform them leaves the agent blameworthy.
In developing this model, Pink appeals primarily to Suárez, as he has in
other publications. However, I find this somewhat puzzling, since Pink is
clearly uncomfortable with some of Suárez’s claims (see, for example,
p. 137 in Schwartz and pp. 189–90 in HL) and a more congenial interlocutor
– Suárez’s antagonist, Gabriel Vázquez – seems ready at hand. Why Pink
might be uncomfortable with Suárez is easy to see once the point of
Irwin’s paper has been grasped. Pink wants to develop an account where
obligation arises naturalistically rather than voluntaristically and where
being blameworthy means having failed to meet one’s obligations. But as
Irwin shows, Suárez distinguishes between obligation and duty, thinks vio-
lating one’s duties is sufficient for being blameworthy, and gives a voluntar-
istic account of obligation. Pink could respond that debitum is more
fundamental to Suárez’s moral philosophy than his notion of obligatio and
 402 SYDNEY PENNER

that the notion we pick out with the English term ‘obligation’ actually cor-
responds more closely to Suárez’s ‘debitum’ than to his ‘obligatio’. In that
case, when Pink attributes views on obligation to Suárez he would be
picking up on what Suárez says about debitum, for which he does want to
give a non-voluntaristic account and which he does tie to blame. But
Pink’s papers do not make it clear that this is his strategy.
Among the finest of the papers in these volumes are the two papers on sub-
stantial forms. The different flavours of the papers makes reading them next
to each other especially interesting. In Helen Hattab’s story of the shifting
views from Aquinas to Suárez to Descartes, Suárez is the ‘tragic hero’,
since in his innovative attempt to defend scholastic Aristotelianism he rede-
fines substantial form as an incomplete substance that looks more like an
internal efficient cause than like Aquinas’s formal cause, and emphasizes
empirical justifications for believing in the existence of substantial forms,
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innovations that end up preparing the ground for the replacement of substan-
tial forms with mechanical principles. Christopher Shields is less interested
in tracing shifting conceptions than in evaluating what he takes to be
Suárez’s strongest arguments on behalf of substantial forms. Along with a
delightful skewering of ill-informed dismissals of substantial forms,
Shields provides a spirited defence of Suárez’s arguments, showing that
Suárez already responds in anticipation to negative arguments deployed
against substantial forms by later philosophers and arguing that Suárez pro-
vides abductive arguments for the existence of substantial forms that merit
serious consideration. There are phenomena of unity and integration that
call for explanation. Substantial forms provide a candidate with explanation.
Are Hattab’s portrait of a tragic hero and Shields’ portrayal of a sophisticated
philosopher ably defending a credible view, incompatible? Aristotle tells us
in the Poetics that a tragic hero’s misfortune is brought about by some error
or frailty on the hero’s part. If Shields recognizes such error or frailty in
Suárez’s account, he does not dwell on it. But neither is it entirely clear in
Hattab’s account what the error or frailty is taken to be. Perhaps Suárez’s
error is in strategy, that is, in failing to anticipate how his defence of substan-
tial forms could, when misinterpreted, lead to contrary views. It is, certainly,
entirely possible to be a sophisticated philosopher – indeed, a sophisticated
philosopher holding true views – and yet fall from favour and become mere
soil for a revolution to which one is opposed.
May the four volumes reviewed in this essay do their part to return Suárez
to favour. Schwartz and HL should be first stops for anyone wanting to know
something about Suárez and his philosophy. These are the volumes that will
be of interest to a broader audience, e.g. those working on canonical early
modern figures who would like to acquire some acquaintance with late scho-
lastics, such as Suárez. For those who would venture onward, the Doyle and
Sgarbi volumes offer a wealth of additional material.

Merton College, University of Oxford

 SOME RECENT WORKS ON SUÁREZ 403

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blanchette, Oliva. “Suárez and the Latent Essentialism of Heidegger’s

Fundamental Ontology”. The Review of Metaphysics 53 (1999): 3–19.
Caputo, John D. Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming
Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982.
Enfield, William. The History of Philosophy, from the Earliest Times to the
Beginnings of the Present Century Drawn up from Brucker’s ‘Historia
Critica Philosophiae’, vol. 2. London: J. Johnson, 1791.
Gilson, Étienne. Being and Some Philosophers. 2nd ed. Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952.
Miner, Robert C. “Suárez as Founder of Modernity: Reflections on a Topos
in Recent Historiography”. History of Philosophy Quarterly 18 (2001):
17–36.
Novotný, Daniel Dominik. “Prolegomena to a Study of Beings of Reason
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in Post-Suárezian Scholasticism, 1600–1650”. Studia Neoaristotelica

3 (2006): 117–41.
Westerman, Pauline. “Suárez and the Formality of Law”. In Politische
Metaphysik: Die Enstehung moderner Rechtskonzeptionen in der spa-
nischen Scholastik, edited by Matthias Kaufmann and Robert Schnepf,
227–37. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007.