Hill/Lagerlund: The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez

Pár postřehů k třetí části knihy ("Mind and Psychology") s citáty a strukturou článků.

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James B. South (Marquette) Suarez, Immortality, and the Soul's Dependence on the Body

I. The Probable arguments

II. The demonstrative arguments

III. Suarez and some texts from Aristotle

IV. Suarez and the proper operation of the intellect

Část shrnutí B. Hilla:

"South ... considers Suarez's argumens for the immortality of the soul. We have already seen in Hattab that this was a crucial premise in Suarez's general defense of substantial forms. ... South argues in particular that Suarez's thinking about the soul - anti-Averroist as it was - was distinctively shaped by Pomponazzi and his Averroist challenge to its immortality being naturally demonstrable. ... Suarez established that the soul has an operation proper to itself, argues South, by reconceiving the phantasm - intellect relation as a kind of parallelism rather than any kind of causal relationship. South calls this 'cognitive process dualism,' by which he means that 'no material cognitive process (that is, sensation) can really effect a spiritual cognitive result and no spiritual cognitive process can effect a change in the material cognitive power.' (The similarities with Descartes' infamous interaction problem are not lost to South.) This solves Pomponazzi's Averroist challenge by, in effect, making all cognitions dependent on soul and soul alone, and this is knowable through the natural light as Suarez has just shown." (p. 10)

Ze závěru:

"Let me sum up. Suarez has argued himself into an account of the intellect in which the intellect must do it all, as it were, because the traditional distinction between the agent and potential intellects has been eradicated. In addition the intellect is not causally connected to the vital opertions of the soul, the common operations. Although, thanks to an inner harmony or consonance among its powers, the intellect thinks whenever the imagination imagines. ... The thoroughgoing insistence by Pomponazzi on the inextricability of matter and form, even where that form is a human intellect, had pushed Suarez into a kind of incipient dualism. Of course he was only halfway there since he remained committed to a hylomorphic analysis of substances, including human beings and laso because he did not have Descartes' conception of matter. Nonetheless in consolidating all intellective functions within a 'mind' causally unaffected by the body he was clearly pushing the boundaries of Aristotelian thought. Hence it does not appear too surprising when Suarez writes: 'However, in human beings, even though a human being is what especially subsists, nonetheless this subsistence is due especially to the soul, which is united to a body not as if it were receiving support form the body, but rather as using it as a conjoined instrument." (CDA disp. 14, q. 1 no 2, p. 135)

"As interesting as it would be to compare these passages more fully, the point of this chapter is not to show that Suarez is a proto-Cartesian, but rather to show that the radical moves Suarez made within the tradition were quite well motivated. Thus historians of philosophy ingore the context of a thinker like Suarez with some peril when we read him simply as someone who did not understand Aquinas properly. In addition, that context is one that is decisively shaped by the philosophical movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that fact, in turn, suggests that if we really want a proper appreciation of the transition to modern philosophy, we are likely to find it through additional explorations of sixteenth-century thinkers." (p. 136)

Cees Leijenhorst (Nijmegen): Suarez on Self-Awareness

I. Suarez on sensory self-knowledge

II. Suarez on intellectual self-knowledge

III. Suarez on intellective self-knowledge of the separate soul

"What we see here is a fine specimen of traditional Jesuit probabilistic reasoning. Suarez cast serious doubt on Aquinas' account of self-knowledge. He realized, however, that his argument takes him into domains very closely border on theological matters, more specifically the mode of being ad knowing of separate souls. Now as a Jesuit, Suarez was bound to defend the opinion of Aquinas in theology but not necessarily in philosophy. In philosophy, Suarez was anything but a faithful Thomist. More often than not he sided with Scotus against Aquinas. However, these borderline cases between scientia de anima, metaphysics, theology seem to be of an altogether different matter. Here, Suarez choose to be less outspoken and to decide the issue ad mentem Thomae. However, in the meantime Suarez had, with convincing reasons, shown that his anti-Thomistic rejection of the opposition between self-knowledge in this life and self-knowledge in the hereafter is 'probabilis,' which in the Jesuit vocabulary meant that it could be discussed and defended in the classroom. So Suarez had dropped his bomb, although in the end he runs away from its consequences. Suarez played the orthodox Thomist while making it very clear that Aquinas' view was in fact quite problematic." (p. 152)

  

IV. Conclusion

"We have seen that with respect to sensory self-awareness, Suarez was highly critical of Aquinas's views. Most importantly, Suarez defended the anti-Tomistic position that awareness of a sensory act is not the product of a separate act by the common sense. On the contrary, in its guise as 'vital act' each sensory act carried with it a form of pre-reflexive awareness that explains why if we see the colour red we are immediately aware of our seeing the colour red. Furthermore, Suarez also criticized Aquinas' account of self-knowledge of the separate soul. Suarez showed that Aquinas' asymmetry between mediated self-knowledge in this life and immediate per se self-knowledge in the hereafter leads to a set of insurmountable conflicts. on both of these issues Suarez showed a remarkable amount of originality and a surprising degree of autonomy with respect to the Doctor Universalis. But order to fully gauge the extent of Suarez's originality, his views would have to be compared with those developed by his fellow Jesuits, such as the Coimbra commentators, Franciscus Toletus, and others. This, however, requires further research, which has to wait for another occasion." (p. 152-153)

Marleen Rozemond (Toronto): Unity in the Multiplicity of Suarez's Soul

"According to an old and venerable view in the history of western philosophy, the human soul is a single, simple, indivisible entity. The view goes back as far as Plato, in particular his Phaedo. Furthermore, there is an old and venerable argument for this kind of view that finds its best-known expressions in the Second Paralogism in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He stated the argument as follows:

   That the action of which can never be regarded as the concurrence of several things acting, is simple.
   Now the soul, or the thinking 'I', is such a being. Therefore, etc. A351

The argument proposes that the subject of thought must be simple because thinking is the kind of activity that can't be regarded as the 'concurrence of several things acting,' as would have to be the case for the action of a composite. Kant ... labeled the argument 'The Achilles of all dialectical inferences in the pure doctrine of the soul.' Following Kant it is often called 'the Achilles Argument.' The argument turns on what now are labeled issues around the 'unity of consciousness,' and it was widely used during the early modern period." (p. 154)

I. The soul as the root of its faculties

II. The soul's efficient causality

III. The unity in Suarez's soul and the Achilles Argument

IV. Suarez and the Achilles Argument: Similarities and differences

V. Conclusion

"In thinking that he powers of the soul are really distinct from it and from each other, Suarez attributes a kind of complexity to the soul that was common in Scholasticism but which seems to stand in marked contrast with the view widespread in the early modern period (and not nearly new with that period) that the soul is simple or indivisible. Significant problems arise from this ontological complexity in combination with Suarez's view that the powers can't interact, problems which we would now mostly classify as problems for the unity of consciousness. But Suarez was keenly aware of these problems and he offered solutions to them by arguing for a strong role of a single soul in the activities of its powers. And he uses this role to argue further that at the heart of this line of thinking there are some important ideas that have real affinity with the Achilles Argument. Stepping back from the details, it is striking to see that while, in marked contrast with the Achilles Argument, Suarez accepted the ontological complexity of the soul with its faculties, at the same time, like the proponents of the Achilles Argument, he saw the need for a single, unitary soul to explain the activities we now call properly mental, or even in his view, of living things more generally. 

       Suarez's conception of the soul was marked by several tensions: he regarded the soul as the principle of life generally, but focused his discussion of it on mental phenomena. He regarded souls as substantial forms, but focused on the atypical human soul. He thought the soul plus its faculties was one by aggregation, but saw a need for a single, unitary soul undelying the activities of these faculties. Buried, as it were, in Suarez's complex Aristotelian Scholastic soul there is single, unitary entity, whose involvement in its activities relies on attention, suggestive of the Cartesian unitary conscious subject, an entity that is 'the same soul' that senses, imagines, and understands.

      I have argued for a similarity between Suarez's line of thought and the early modern Achilles Argument. But there are also important differences. I have not aimed to establish any particular historical connections, and the early modern uses of the Achilles Argument. I have no views about such connections, and the early moderns had far too wide a range of philosophical views accessible to them for me to consider any claims of such kind. ... " (p. 172)