Francisco Suarez Selections from De Anima
Translating Authors: John Kronen got his undergraduate degree at Marquette University in 1985, and his doctorate at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He studied under Jorge Gracia at Buffalo, and his dissertation concerned the substantial unity of material substances. He has taught at St. Tho-mas since 1990. His areas of specialty include Baroque Scholasticism, Metaphysics, and Indian Philo-sophy. Jeremiah Reedy Professor Emeritus of Classics specialized in textual criticism and Indo-European linguistics at the University of Michigan. His current interests include Latin and Greek (languages and literature), mythology, and Greek philosophy. His publications include translations and editions of both Greek and Latin works, plus articles on many aspects of Greek philosophy. Since retiring in 2004 he has been doing research, writing, and teaching at the U. of St. Thomas as an adjunct professor.
Table of ContentsIntroduction 9DE ANIMA________ Disputation I: On the Substance of the Soul in General 30Question 1 Whether the soul is act in the sense of being a substantial form 30Question 2Whether and in what way the soul is first act 45Question 3Whether the soul possesses an essential ordination to an organic body 65Question 4What the quidditative definition of the soul isand how one definition is proven through another 84 DE ANIMA________ Disputation II 108 Question 3Whether the principle of understanding in humansis something incorporeal, subsistent, and immortal 108Bibliography 177
Introduction I: The Science of the Soul In the medieval university psychology--“the science of the soul”-- occupied a pivotal place in the curriculum because it was con-ceived as forming the bridge between natural philosophy and meta-physics. This fact alone indicates that the medievals conceived of psy-chology very differently from the way we do today. In fact, for the medievals it encompassed many of the questions which are now ad-dressed in such separate disciplines as biology, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics, as well as psychology. In order to understand the medieval conception of psychology, one must first un-derstand the theological interest the medievals took in the science of the soul, as well as understanding something of the way they adopted the ontology of Aristotle to support a sophisticated intellectual super-structure for all the sciences. And understanding both is necessary for understanding Suarez’s De anima since, although Suarez does not chronologically belong to the medieval period, he does intellectually-his cathedral of thought is one of the most imposing monuments of scholastic philosophy and theology, and it provided not only later Catholic but also Protestant thinkers with skillfully wrought intellec-tual weapons with which to defend central Christian doctrines against what they perceived to be threats to such doctrines arising from cer-tain currents of the Enlightenment. The medieval wedding of Aristotle’s thought with Christian Orthodoxy can perhaps best be understood if one bears in mind, both the account of creation found in Genesis, and the doctrine of the resur-rection. If we look at Genesis, we will find that, on the one hand, it makes a clear distinction in kind between different orders of being (what the medievals referred to as “degrees of ontological perfection”) while, on the other hand, it affirms a certain continuity between the orders of being, a continuity arising not only from the fact that all or-ders of being were created by God, but also from the fact that God created all material substances from a common matter or stuff, a stuff Genesis declares to be formless and void prior to God’s fashioning of celestial and terrestrial beings out of it. God finally fashions Adam’s body out of this common stuff and breathes into it a soul, a soul which the majority of Christian thinkers hold to be the ontological basis in man of his bearing God’s image and likeness. That the telos of crea-tion is focused on man is indicated by the fact that man was created last, that God made him the terrestrial guardian of the animals, and that, although upon seeing various of His works God declared them to be good, it is only after man’s creation that God declares the world to be “very good”. The story of creation in Genesis is obviously opposed to the reductive materialism of the Epicureans, who held that the world came about through the chance collision of the atoms and, further, that all the intrinsic constituents of all things are the same (viz. the atoms), their differences, such as they are, arising only from differences in the arrangement and proportion of the atoms. That Genesis is opposed to this view of things is obvious to contemporary intellectuals due to the fact that the contemporary children of Epicurus, having become em-boldened by the Darwinian theory of evolution, now dominate not only the hard science departments of Western universities, but their social science and philosophy departments as well. That Genesis is no less opposed to other non-materialist world views is not as clear to academics because such views now have no foothold in universities or other respectable intellectual circles, though one can still discern their influence in “New Age” spirituality. We are thinking here of panthe-ism (the most popular current form of which can be found in the quasi deification of “energy”, a deification which runs throughout the Star Wars saga), as well as of various types of dualism which conceive of the soul of man (and of other animals) as a purely spiritual substance which has, for one reason or another, become “trapped” in matter. The Fathers of the Church, relying on Genesis, were as op-posed to the pantheistic identification of the natural with the super-natural and the dualistic severing of nature from the supernatural, as they were to reductive materialism. In the thought of Plato the Church Fathers found a sophisticated philosophy which they wielded with great force against materialism. But Plato’s thought proved to be a two-edged sword. Plotinus and Proclus showed that it can be taken to have pantheistic implications, and whenever in the history of Christian thought Neo-Platonism is influential, one finds a tendency towards pantheism or even monism. Furthermore, Plato, in the Phaedo, de-fended an anthropology according to which the body is a prison for the soul, and though the great Christian Platonist, Origen, developed this anthropology in a way that better harmonizes with Christianity than Plato’s original teaching does, his anthropology is not consistent with Catholic Orthodoxy, and the Nicene Creed’s insistence on the resurrection of the body (note there is no mention in it of the immor-tality of the soul) was meant to be a strong affirmation of the teaching of Genesis that the body is an integral part of human nature, not a prison of the soul. But as long as Christian thinkers continued to think of the soul as a spiritual substance along basically Platonic lines, it was difficult for them to consistently maintain either the soul’s essen-tial unity with the body or the integrity of the human person as con-sisting of both soul and body. It was Aquinas who, using Aristotle’s thought, first achieved a truly integrated Christian anthropology that was able to maintain both the immortality of the human soul and its natural affinity with the body. Aquinas did this by brilliantly arguing that there is no contradic-tion in holding that an entity could be both 1) subsistent and 2) the substantial form of a living organism. This requires some explanation. As understood by Aquinas, Aristotle held that all material substances are composed of two princi-ples, prime matter and substantial form. Prime matter is not, on this doctrine, a kind of substance-it is an entity so bereft of actuality that it lacks all quality, quantity, or active power-it is a pure capacity to be which is nevertheless not nothing (although it isn’t something ei-ther!!). In short, to fully be at all, prime matter needs to be united with a substantial form, where a substantial form is understood to be the intrinsic actualization of matter’s capacity to be the “body” of such and such a sort of substance, e.g., a tree, a cat, or a human. On this view matter is merely a substratum of form and a capacity to receive it. In these ways it is like a complete substance (e.g., a human being) with respect to the accidental forms (property tropes) the substance could acquire (e.g., the ability to speak French, the thinking of some-thing in French, etc.). But it is unlike a complete substance in that it is not, in itself, an existent entity-it needs form in order to be at all, and, absent form, would lapse into pure non-being. Aquinas gave several arguments for hylomorphism (the “form/matter” doctrine), the most prominent being based on the nature of change. According to Aquinas every change (as opposed to crea-tion ex nihilo) requires a subject of change (i.e. something that chang-es), but some changes are substantial (i.e. issue in a new substance that did not exist before-e.g., the coming to be of a kitten), and the subject of such changes could not be a substance or group of sub-stances since, if either were the case, the change would be accidental (as when a cat gets fatter or a group of Legos are rearranged); hence, the subject can only be a sub-substantial potency (matter) actualized by a substantial form. On this doctrine matter accounts for features common to all material substances (e.g. mass, inertia, divisibility), and all of these features are primarily passive, while form accounts for features pecu-liar to different species of material substance and for their more active powers, as well as for the so-called metaphysical degrees of sub-stances, moving up from the inanimate, through plants and animals, and culminating in the human being. In short, by positing prime mat-ter Aquinas provided an ontological grounding of a physics and an-thropology consistent with the cosmogony and cosmology implicit in Genesis since Genesis teaches not only that there is a “stuff” common to all material substances, but also that there are essential differences between material substances, differences requiring special acts of God in the coming-to-be of the first plants, fish, birds, etc. But what about the fact that Genesis clearly teaches that in the creation of man God, acting in a “super” special way, breathed into man a soul thus making him in the divine image and likeness? And what about the doctrine of the resurrection which not only teaches the importance of the body, but seems to require that the soul of a person survive death in order that the resurrected human be numerically the same as the person who died? Aquinas felt the hylomorphic theory could be adopted in such a way as to be consistent with Church teach-ings about humans and the special status of the human soul as spiri-tual. He did this by introducing the idea of a subsistent substantial form. A subsistent form is a form which has such a degree of perfec-tion that it can naturally exist without informing matter. A subsistent substantial form is a subsistent form that is intrinsically ordered to informing matter in order to constitute with it a complete substance. Such a subsistent form is thus not a complete substance on its own, though it can exist without informing matter. Aquinas argued there is no contradiction in positing such a form since “the higher can do what the lower can”-therefore if a non-subsistent substantial form (e.g. the form of a cat) has enough ontological “thickness” to actualize the ca-pacity of matter to be the body of a certain sort of substance, so, a for-tiori, does a subsistent substantial form. Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy with Christian Theology was powerful enough to win for him a school, one that ex-tends from Capreolus, through Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, and Zigliara, to Eleonore Stump. Suarez does not belong to this school; nevertheless on several central points he agrees with St. Thomas against, for example, Scotus. In psychology probably the most impor-tant point of agreement between Aquinas and Suarez is their insistence on the singularity of the substantial form (i.e. that every material sub-stance has, and can only have, one substantial form) contra Scotus and Occam, as being both a logical corollary of the very nature of the sub-stantial form, and as necessary to safeguard the substantial unity of the human person. Though Suarez adopted, in large measure, Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotle and Christian Theology, unlike Aquinas he produced a complete metaphysical treatise which is not a commentary on Aris-totle’s Metaphysics. This is the celebrated Metaphysical Disputations, which, to this day, remains the most thorough and rigorous treatment of an Aristotelian metaphysics ever penned. In spite of its thorough-ness, it does not treat of a number of questions raised by the medieval Schoolmen. This is because Suarez, like all Scholastics, held that metaphysics is the “study of being qua being”; hence, it is concerned with the two fundamental aspects of being, essence and existence (which, for Suarez, are only conceptually distinct), the transcendental attributes of being (i.e. unity, truth, and goodness), the causes of being (material, formal, efficient, and final), and the ultimate categories of being (i.e. substance, quality, quantity, etc.). Insofar as form and mat-ter are fundamental causes of being, Suarez felt he could treat of them in a very general way in the Metaphysical Disputations, but not in the detail one would in a treatise on physics (which the medievals held is primarily concerned with the ontological structure and powers of in-animate substances), or one on psychology (which the medievals held is primarily concerned with the ontological structure and powers of living material substances). Suarez thus, in his De anima, sought to make his own version of a Christian Aristotelianism more complete by writing a treatise on the natures of living beings as such, as well as on the main divisions of living beings (plant, brute, and human). Suarez’s De anima, like his Metaphysical Disputations, is not a commentary on Aristotle, though Suarez, in a general way, follows the order of topics laid out by Aristotle in his De anima, and he refers to Aristotle’s seminal work with great frequency. In the first Disputa-tion of Suarez’s De anima, translated here in its entirety, Suarez treats of living beings taken as a whole. In this Disputation he links his psy-chology to his general metaphysics. This is particularly clear in the first question of the Disputation, which gives a brief proof of Aristote-lian hylomorphism, as well as giving a proof of the existence of a spe-cial class of material substances which are distinguished from other material substances in that they are capable of immanent actions, i.e. actions which begin and end in the same substance. Even plants, in this way, are “self moving” in the actions of nutrition and growth. In the later questions of this Disputation Suarez answers questions per-taining to the nature of the substantial form (i.e. the soul) characteris-tic of all living beings. Throughout the Disputation Suarez is chiefly committed to defending a substantivalist view of the nature of the soul and, hence, of the human person, against notions of the person that adumbrate the psychological concept of it found in Locke’s writings, and that echo the ancient Buddhist “no-self” doctrine. But Suarez is equally committed to defending, against dualism, that the soul is an incomplete substance, which is by its nature ordered to informing an appropriately disposed matter in order to constitute with it a living substance. We have translated all of Disputation I because it casts light on how Suarez, and the Scholastics in general, understood the science of the soul. They did not understand it to be an investigation of imma-terial substances à la Descartes, because souls are not substances. They are, at best, incomplete substances which, with matter, constitute a living organism. In this respect it might be better to speak of “the science of living beings” or even of “biology”, rather than of “the sci-ence of the soul”. But even that would not be quite right either since, although the Scholastics were more interested than is often thought with the physical structures of living beings, as well as in the essential roles these structures play in explaining the powers of living beings, they were not very advanced in these questions and, unlike most con-temporary biologists, they did not conceive of the “principle of life” in living beings as a complex set of relations between inanimate sub-stances, but as a “thing” or res. In short, though for them the soul is an incomplete substance, it is nevertheless an incomplete substance, not an instance of an especially complex way of arranging inanimate substances. This aspect of their teaching was as theologically motivated as their rejection of a dualist view of the human person. For just as a du-alist view of the person seemed to them to conflict both with Genesis and the doctrine of the resurrection, so too, it seemed to them that a materialist view of the person did as well. Materialists hold that the intrinsic principles of life in humans is not subsistent and so cannot survive in separation from the body. But, for the Schoolmen, this would entail both that the human person was not created in God’s im-age and likeness, and also that the resurrection would be impossible since, without the soul, there could not be the continuity necessary between the person who died and the resurrected person. Further-more, the Schoolmen held that all purely material substances are so determined by their natures that they are unable to act freely in the libertarian sense. Hence any materialist view of the human person must entail a determinism about human action that is incompatible with morality and religion. That the science of the soul as conceived by the Schoolmen was focused, in part, on highlighting the ways in which humans are unlike other beings, as well as on the ways they are like them, pro-vides another reason for not equating that science with modern con-ceptions of biology. The fundamental difference of human souls from all other souls, according to the Schoolmen, is a predominate theme of the second main selection from Suarez’s De anima we have chosen to translate, viz. section 3 of Disputation II. In this section Suarez is concerned to prove the subsistence and immortality of the human soul from reason alone. He is quite thorough here, marshalling virtually all the arguments that philosophers and theologians in the Christian tradi-tion have put forward for this proposition. That he was so thorough is partially explained by the fact that Pomponazzi and others of Suarez’s time had held that the immortality of the human soul can only be known by divine revelation, not by reason. But Suarez held that such a position undermines the rationality of believing in Christianity every bit as much as the fideistic position that one cannot know of God’s existence through natural reason-hence his particular zeal in wishing to show that natural reason can show that the human soul is subsistent and immortal. Suarez’s magisterial De anima might seem to be a sophisti-cated defense of an ancient “science” we now know to be a pseudo-science. Indeed those familiar with the history of psychology might (mistakenly, we think) take the Scholastic notion of the science of the soul to be based on the assumption of a “vital force”, an assumption discredited in the 19th century. Others might see it as built on mis-takes about language, mistakes exposed in the early 20th century by Wittgenstein. But such judgments would be hasty. Certain contempo-rary philosophers have given powerful arguments for the conclusion that only a modified Aristotelianism which recognizes the existence of natural kind sortals can make sense of the identity of things over time, of the difference between accidental and substantial change, and of the difference between a mere correlation and a causal explanation. It is true that these philosophers are not as metaphysically intrepid as Sua-rez was; they do not posit any such strange entities as substantial form and prime matter (at least not if one conceives of these as Suarez did). But it may be that, if they were to carefully think through the logical entailments of their views with the same care as Suarez did, they would be forced either to posit such strange entities, or nearly as strange analogues of them. Indeed David Wiggins, the most thorough of the current crop of Neo-Aristotelians, admits as much. And, an-yway, if one thinks about it, it is hard to accept the view that substan-tial form and prime matter are any stranger than black holes, dark mat-ter, or the micro-particles of quantum physics, and if we don’t mock physicists for positing extremely strange, unobservable entities to ac-count for what we do observe, why should we mock the Schoolmen for doing the same? At any rate, as long as a fundamentally Aristote-lian essentialism remains a live metaphysical option for some, Suarez’s De anima will continue to remain relevant to the philosophi-cal investigation of living beings in general and of human beings in particular. II: Summary of the Contents of the Selections Translated We thought it would be helpful to briefly summarize the con-tents of each of the questions of the De anima we have chosen to translate. These include all the questions of Disputation I, “On the Substance of the Soul in General”, and of all of question 3 of Disputa-tion II, “On the Immateriality and Immortality of the Rational Soul”, a question nearly as long as all the questions of disputation I combined! Disputation I, Question 1: Whether the soul is an act in the sense of being a substantial form: Two arguments are given for the view that souls are not substantial forms-An argument based on commonly held beliefs concerning how living beings differ from non-living ones is given for the conclusion that there is some intrinsic principle in living beings distinct from the bodies of such beings-This principle we call “soul”-A re-view of pre-Aristotelian opinions concerning the soul is given-All these are deemed unsatisfactory since they entail that living beings are accidental, not per se, unities-Only the hylomorphic theory of Aristotle according to which souls are the substantial forms of living beings harmonizes with the fact that living be-ings are true, substantial unities; hence the soul is a substantial form-Answers to the contrary arguments given at the beginning of the question will be clear from what is said in succeeding questions of this Disputation 2 Question 2: Whether and in what way the soul is first act: The soul is absolutely first act since it is that by which a living being principally lives and is the root of all its vital powers, habits, and activities-Two arguments are considered for the un-common view that the substantial form of a living being is not its soul-The first is based on the idea that every act perfects a thing and that habits and activities all perfect a living being more than its substantial form does-The second is based on the principle that every first act is separable from every second act, and the fact that the souls of some living beings are not separa-ble from their second acts-Two responses to the first argument are considered and rejected-The true answer to the first argu-ment depends on distinguishing what an act adds to a substance taken in itself from what it adds to a substance taken in con-junction with other acts-Cajetan’s response to the second objec-tion is examined and deemed to be beside the point-The correct answer is to note that to be first act is to be that which gives substantial being; it is not to be that which gives substantial be-ing that can exist without second act-A discussion of when be-ing able to cease from acting is an indication of a perfection and when it is an indication of an imperfection concludes the question 3. Question 3: Whether the soul possesses an essential ordina-tion to an organic body: The soul being the form of a living organism would seem to bespeak an essential relation both to matter and the living organism it partially constitutes-But some deny this because they hold that the soul, being a substantial entity, cannot include in its very notion a relation to something else; otherwise it would be an accident-Four arguments are giv-en for the conclusion that the soul is essentially ordered to mat-ter and to the composite, the chief of which is taken from the nature of the soul as a form-The soul’s aptitude towards in-forming matter is not anything really distinct from the soul it-self, any more than the ability of the heat of a hot thing to pro-duce heat in another thing is really distinct from the heat itself-Souls are similar to all other substantial forms in 1) being able to actualize matter and thus to constitute, along with matter, a complete material substance and 2) requiring certain disposi-tions in matter in order to actualize it-Souls differ from other substantial forms in 1) requiring a great number of different ac-cidental dispositions in matter and 2) in conferring a nobler and richer being than other forms do-Of these differences (2) is ba-sic since the necessity that the body of a living organism have an organic structure arises from the richness of the essential be-ing the soul confers on the organism-Different senses of “or-ganic structure” and “organic body” are discussed-In one way “organic structure” refers to a collection of physical accidents in a living body (e.g. shape, size, temperature, etc.) which could persist in a corpse-In another way it refers to the these acci-dents as informed in different ways by the soul, and taken in this way there is no true organic structure in a corpse-In short the various parts of a living organism cannot be understood in separation from the whole organism and the most essential con-stituent of a living organism is its soul-“Organic body” can also be taken in two ways-In one way “organic body” refers to or-ganically structured matter in potency to life, not in such a way as to currently be without life but capable of receiving it, but in such a way as to now be receiving life from the soul-In another way “organic body” refers to the entire composite consisting of matter and form-These two ways of understanding “organic body” are only conceptually distinct-A difficulty is raised con-cerning how the soul could be ordered to an organic body, whether “organic body” is understood to mean matter with cer-tain accidental dispositions, or it is understood to mean the liv-ing substance itself consisting of a body and a soul-The first way of understanding this ordering seems impossible because it implies that a substantial entity (the soul) depends on certain accidental entities, which is contrary to the very nature of a substantial entity-The second way of understanding this order-ing also seems impossible because the soul cannot be thought to depend upon something it constitutes; this would be to make the cause depend on its effect-In answer to the purported im-possibility of the soul’s being, in any way, ordered to accidents, it is insisted that the soul is not here understood to be ordered to accidents as such, but to matter having certain accidents which dispose it for the reception of the soul, and there is no difficulty in supposing that some substantial entity depends for its being on another substantial entity-In answer to the purported impos-sibility of the soul’s being ordered to the composite it partially constitutes, it is argued that the essence of intrinsically partial entities can best be understood through their capacity for con-stituting a whole and this is how Aristotle defines the essence of accidents-In answer to the objection raised at the beginning of the question concerning the difficulty of supposing that an absolute entity could have an intrinsic relation to another entity, it is argued that absolute entities may be defined by way of their relations to other entities without implying that they are them-selves relations-An absolute entity may, in virtue of its very na-ture, be able to have a certain relation to another entity-This is illustrated by reference to artifacts, knowledge, and power 4 Question 4: What is the quidditative definition of the soul and how one definition is proven through another: Two def-initions of the soul have been given by Aristotle, i.e. “The soul is the first act of a physical, organic body that is potentially alive” and, “The soul is the first principle by which we live, sense, and understand”-Some object to both definitions since both include factors extrinsic to the soul-Moreover the first def-inition has superfluous elements and the second is both too broad and too narrow-A distinction is make with respect to every natural thing, viz. the distinction between the substantial being of the thing and its activity-The first definition of the soul is defended-It does not have truly superfluous elements though the phrase “which has life potentially” is meant to clarify the meaning of “organic body”-The first definition is truly quiddi-tative since it captures the very essence of the soul, which is to give life to a composite by actualizing the potency for substan-tial life of an appropriately disposed body-The first definition applies univocally to every soul if it is acknowledged that sepa-rate substances (angels) are not in any way souls but rather spirits-The second definition is defended as adequate but not quidditative-It is shown to be adequate by showing it is neither too broad nor too narrow if correctly understood, i.e. it picks out a certain formal aspect of the soul which is that the soul, in giving substantial life to the composite, also roots vital activi-ties in a way analogous to the way heat makes something hot and also able to heat other things-The second definition can be used to give a sound argument for the first definition even thought that argument is only dialectical, not demonstrative-Some hold the argument is demonstrative since it proceeds from the final cause of the soul, viz. vital activity-This is wrong since the intrinsic and proximate final cause of the soul is to constitute a living substance capable of vital activities-A dis-tinction is made between the epistemic sense of “because” and the ontic sense-Some entities by their very nature have a direct-edness towards other entities (e.g. powers, substantial forms, etc.), while others do only in our way of thinking (e.g. a watch is not intrinsically ordered to “tell time”) 5. Disputation II, Question 3: Whether the principle of under-standing in humans is something incorporeal, subsistent, and immortal: To say that the intellectual soul is immaterial is not only to say that it is not composed of matter since no form is composed of matter-It is rather to say that the intellectual soul does not naturally depend on matter as a sustaining cause-Several philosophical and scriptural arguments are given for the conclusion that the intellectual soul is neither incorporeal nor immortal-It is asserted that the immateriality and immortality of intellectual the soul can be known by reason and by revelation-The arguments from reason are first examined, beginning with metaphysical arguments-These arguments are based on the principle that, if human beings are capable of performing ac-tions that do not intrinsically involve corporeal organs, they possess a power that is purely immaterial, a power that could only emanate from a purely immaterial substantial form-Ten arguments are given for the conclusion that humans are capable of performing actions that do not intrinsically depend on a cor-poreal organ ranging from the ability of humans to form ab-stract concepts to their ability to act with libertarian freedom-After establishing that the intellectual soul is immaterial, a met-aphysical argument based on that soul’s immateriality is given for the conclusion that it is immortal-No form can corrupt es-sentially and an immaterial form cannot corrupt accidentally by losing its sustaining substratum since it does not have one; hence the intellectual soul is incorruptible; hence it is immortal-Next moral arguments are given for the view that the intellec-tual soul is immortal-The chief of these is from divine provi-dence-It is known by natural reason that God exists and rules the world justly, but justice demands that the wicked who pros-per in this life should be punished after death and that the virtu-ous who suffer should be rewarded-Objections to this argument given by John Duns Scotus are raised and answered-That the immortality of the intellectual soul can be known by natural reason is corroborated by the number of prominent pagan thinkers who believed that the intellectual soul is immortal-It is admitted that Aristotle’s view is obscure and that some promi-nent scholars have concluded that he held that the intellectual soul is mortal-This view is rejected by means of a subtle analy-sis of texts from the Aristotle’s De anima and Metaphysics-Next the question of what the Faith teaches is raised-The opin-ions of certain Fathers and Scholastics are mentioned who ei-ther held that the intellectual soul is mortal or that is it not de fide that the soul is immortal-Evidence from the councils, the pontiffs, and the more prominent theologians is given to sup-port the conclusion that it is de fide that the intellectual soul is immortal-Moreover it is argued that the immortality of the in-tellectual soul is entailed by certain doctrines of the faith that all would agree are de fide-Brief responses are given to the con-trary arguments considered at the beginning of the question IV: The Place of Suarez’s De anima in his “Super System” José Pereira has invented the term “super system” to describe Suarez’s work taken as a whole. This is apt because Suarez seems to have been the first Western thinker to have produced a fully realized and internally coherent system of metaphysics and theology. Suarez’s metaphysical system, the great Disputationes metaphysicae, was writ-ten by him intentionally in order to clarify the metaphysical concepts and conclusions necessary to understand sacred theology. This work is consistent throughout in style and genre and is powerfully unified by an ingenious organizational structure, a structure that arises from Suarez’s conception of the formal object of metaphysics and the methods metaphysics should employ. In contrast to his metaphysical system, Suarez’s theological system was not created so deliberately. Rather, over many years, he wrote systematic works on various theological questions, being im-pelled to do so, not only by their intrinsic importance, but also by con-troversies concerning some of them that were raging in the Church at the time. These works were gathered together after his death and printed in several volumes according to the order demanded by a sys-tematic treatment of theology rather than according to the chronologi-cal order of their writing. That it was possible to do this is a tribute to Suarez’s consistency as a thinker, to his having a powerfully unified philosophical and theological system “in his head”. Though Suarez’s De anima is more of a philosophical work than a theological one, and though Suarez had already treated of the soul in his On the Work of the Six Days and the Soul, Suarez’s editors (perhaps following Sua-rez’s express wishes) thought that, since the science of the soul is es-sential both for understanding ethics and Christian soteriology, it was fitting to publish it along with Suarez’s other, clearly theological works. The ordering of Suarez’s works acceding to their integration into a titanic theological system is as follows: De divina substantia eiusque attributis (1606) De divina praedestinatione et reprobatione (1606) De sanctissimo Trinitatis mysterio (1606) De angelis (1620) De opere sex dierum (1621) De anima (1621) De ultimo fine hominis (1628) De legibus (1612) De gratia (1619) De fide, spe et charitate (1622) De religione (1608-1625) De Incarnatione (1590-1592) De sacramentis (1593-1603) Including the De anima in this list of theological works en-tailed that certain questions raised in On the Work of the Six Days and the Soul are raised again in the immediately succeeding treatise. But even these repetitions are never mere repetitions since in the former work Suarez treats questions primarily from a theological point of view, relying heavily on the Scriptures, the Fathers, and the Councils, while in the latter he treats them primarily from a philosophical point of view. V: A Note on Texts Used and a Note of Thanks In preparing this translation we have relied on Salvadore Cas-tellote’s critical edition of Suarez’s De anima, an edition he prepared to go along with the Spanish translation of the work. This is the only critical edition of the work and it makes use of all other known extant editions. We are have profited much from Castellote’s scholarship-it allowed us to obtain precise bibliographical information on a range of works Suarez cites in the De anima. We have used the Loeb edition of Aristotle’s De anima in cross checking Castellote’s references to Aris-totle’s text. We are greatly indebted to Hans Burkhardt, Ignacio Angelelli and, above all, Stamatios Gerogiorgakis for their careful reading of earlier drafts of the translation and their insightful suggestions for its improvement.
IntroductionI: The Science of the SoulIn the medieval university psychology--"the science of the soul"-- occupied a pivotal place in the curriculum because it was con-ceived as forming the bridge between natural philosophy and meta-physics. This fact alone indicates that the medievals conceived of psy-chology very differently from the way we do today. In fact, for the medievals it encompassed many of the questions which are now ad-dressed in such separate disciplines as biology, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics, as well as psychology. In order to understand the medieval conception of psychology, one must first un-derstand the theological interest the medievals took in the science of the soul, as well as understanding something of the way they adopted the ontology of Aristotle to support a sophisticated intellectual super-structure for all the sciences. And understanding both is necessary for understanding Suarez's De anima since, although Suarez does not chronologically belong to the medieval period, he does intellectually-his cathedral of thought is one of the most imposing monuments of scholastic philosophy and theology, and it provided not only later Catholic but also Protestant thinkers with skillfully wrought intellec-tual weapons with which to defend central Christian doctrines against what they perceived to be threats to such doctrines arising from cer-tain currents of the Enlightenment. The medieval wedding of Aristotle's thought with Christian Orthodoxy can perhaps best be understood if one bears in mind, both the account of creation found in Genesis, and the doctrine of the resur-rection. If we look at Genesis, we will find that, on the one hand, it makes a clear distinction in kind between different orders of being (what the medievals referred to as "degrees of ontological perfection") while, on the other hand, it affirms a certain continuity between the orders of being, a continuity arising not only from the fact that all or-ders of being were created by God, but also from the fact that God created all material substances from a common matter or stuff, a stuff Genesis declares to be formless and void prior to God's fashioning of celestial and terrestrial beings out of it. God finally fashions Adam's body out of this common stuff and breathes into it a soul, a soul which the majority of Christian thinkers hold to be the ontological basis in man of his bearing God's image and likeness. That the telos of crea-tion is focused on man is indicated by the fact that man was created last, that God made him the terrestrial guardian of the animals, and that, although upon seeing various of His works God declared them to be good, it is only after man's creation that God declares the world to be "very good". The story of creation in Genesis is obviously opposed to the reductive materialism of the Epicureans, who held that the world came about through the chance collision of the atoms and, further, that all the intrinsic constituents of all things are the same (viz. the atoms), their differences, such as they are, arising only from differences in the arrangement and proportion of the atoms. That Genesis is opposed to this view of things is obvious to contemporary intellectuals due to the fact that the contemporary children of Epicurus, having become em-boldened by the Darwinian theory of evolution, now dominate not only the hard science departments of Western universities, but their social science and philosophy departments as well. That Genesis is no less opposed to other non-materialist world views is not as clear to academics because such views now have no foothold in universities or other respectable intellectual circles, though one can still discern their influence in "New Age" spirituality. We are thinking here of panthe-ism (the most popular current form of which can be found in the quasi deification of "energy", a deification which runs throughout the Star Wars saga), as well as of various types of du
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 3.8.2012 |
|---|---|
| Reihe/Serie | Liber Conversus |
| Übersetzer | John Kronen, Jeremiah Reedy |
| Verlagsort | München |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 150 x 210 mm |
| Gewicht | 305 g |
| Einbandart | Englisch Broschur |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie des Mittelalters |
| Schlagworte | Christi Geburt bis 1500 nach Chr. • First english translation of the first Sholastic monography on the Soul • Metaphysics • Philosophie des Mittelalters • philosophy of nature • rational soul • Soul |
| ISBN-10 | 3-88405-101-6 / 3884051016 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-3-88405-101-6 / 9783884051016 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
