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Editor’s Foreword
- Leuven University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Editor’s ForEword In his Being and Some Philosophers (1952), before a discussion of modern accounts of ‘being,’ Étienne Gilson writes, “[N]ow that Scholastic philosophy has been dead for nearly five centuries, philosophers don’t even care to remember how it died.”1 Here, one wonders whether Gilson’s report of Scholasticism’s death, like Mark Twain’s, may have been at least a little “exaggerated.” There can be little doubt that today mention of “modern philosophy” – commonly accepted as having begun with the seventeenth-century work of René Descartes – brings to mind a “break” with the “mental shackles”2 that Scholasticism supposedly imposed and also conjures up the images of such canonical figures as Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant. This same “modern” period, however, also witnessed a Scholasticism hardly in its death throes but in truth flourishing and vibrant. Indeed to the names just mentioned can be contrasted Scholastics figures such as Sylvester Mauro (1619-1687), Andreas Semery (1630-1717), Miguel Viñas (1642-1718), Maximilian Wietrowski (1660-1737), and Luis de Lossada (1681-1748), to name only a very few and only Jesuit philosophers at that. Far from dead, Scholasticism only evolved into a different animal, one that only the most intrepid hunters in the field today – if I may be permitted the metaphor – have had the privilege to glimpse. One such “hunter,” well known for his work on Francisco Suárez, is John P. Doyle.3 Indeed, Scholasticism’s Doctor eximius would serve as a launching platform for much of Doyle’s work on late Scholastic thought. To understand how this progression in Doyle’s work unfolded, one must turn to Suárez’s seminal Disputationes metaphysicae, especially, as we shall see, its fifty-fourth disputation. In a feat till then unachieved, the Disputationes metaphysicae (1597) synthesized the Aristotelian metaphysics according to its own principles and inner exigencies , bringing order to the disarrayed, some might even say chaotic, treatises that make up what had come to be known as the Metaphysics. In the opening to his Disputationes, Suárez makes clear that the science of metaphysics concerns 1 Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), 108. 2 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Poltiical and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Time to the Present Day (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1961), 481. Russell’s unsympathetic and biased stance against medieval and Scholastic thought is obvious, almost appallingly so. Consider, for instance, his remark, “Until the seventeenth century, there was nothing of importance in philosophy” (ibid., 481). 3 Much of Doyle’s work on Suárez has recently appeared as Collected Studies on Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548-1617), also published by Leuven University Press, 2010. In many ways, the present volume serves as a companion and sequel to the Suárez volume. VIII EdItor’s ForEword itself with “real being” (ens reale).4 The significance of this claim cannot be overestimated for, as Doyle makes clear throughout the present volume, it points to a fundamental distinction within Aristotle’s thinking on being that would eventually suffer an ‘overcoming’ or a ‘Verwindung’ – to borrow one of Heidegger’s everready neologisms5 – in late Scholastic thought. That distinction is between being taken as ‘being in the categories’ (i.e., real being) and ‘being as true,’ respectively τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὄν and τὸ ὄν ὡς ἀληθές.6 Aristotle excludes ‘being as true’ from the study of metaphysics, and in this, Suárez was content to follow him, as were so many other medieval thinkers.7 Yet, in the fifty-fourth and final disputation of the Disputationes metaphysicae, Suárez, as if succumbing to some secret temptation, makes a foray into ‘beings of reason’ (entia rationis).8 These “quasi-shadowy beings,” as Suárez puts it, play a pedagogical role as they are “necessary for human instruction” and are indispensable to the sciences.9 Yet, as they have no “real being” and consequently no intrinsic intelligibility unto themselves, they can only be understood in their relation to real being. Accordingly, Suárez insists, it properly falls to the metaphysician to consider the features of such beings, which are “quasi-transcendental.”10 Yet, in many ways, here the metaphysician’s examination is, to use one of Doyle’s expressions, very much like trying to pin a wraith to the mat. Beings of reason have no proper formal, final, or material causes; they can only be considered indirectly 4 See Disputationes metaphysicae [hereafter DM] 1.1.26 (ed...