Philosophy of Francisco Suárez

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suárez 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. Suárez contributed to all fields of philosophy, 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 Suárez 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 Suárez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suárez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez is one of the first collections in English written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suárez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suárez for years to come--as well as the history of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suárez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.

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).