This book collects six unpublished and published academic studies on the thought of Francisco Suárez, which is addressed through accurate textual analyses and meticulous contextualization of his doctrines in the Scholastic debate. The present essays aim to portray two complementary aspects coexisting in the work of the Uncommon Doctor: his innovative approach and his adherence to the tradition. To this scope, they focus on some pivotal, but often neglected, topics in Suárez’s metaphysics and psychology – such as his theories of (...) cognition and truth, angelology, continuous quantity – thereby developing an original inquiry into a crucial moment in the development of Western philosophy. (shrink)

According to the standard Aristotelian doctrine of the identity of passion and action (Ipa), a passion and the action with which it is identified are distinguished through a distinction of reason, and both passion and action are located in the patient. Descartes has recently been interpreted by some scholars to be rejecting Ipa in favor of a view that throws into contention a dualistic interpretation of his philosophy of mind. This article contends that Descartes did hold Ipa, albeit expressed in (...) his own metaphysical vocabulary of substance and mode. On this interpretation, (1) a passion and the action with which it is identified are distinguished through a conceptual distinction or distinction of reason and (2) the passion and the action constitute one and the same mode which is locatedin the patient. This result is significant first, because it shows Descartes's retention of a fundamentally Aristotelian understanding of the metaphysical categories of passion and action and second, because it removes some of the support for recent interpretations on which Descartes is seen in the Passions of the Soul to diverge from a dualistic view of mind and body. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore René Descartes' conception of human freedom. I begin with the key interpretive challenges of Descartes' remarks and then turn to two foundational issues in the secondary literature: the philosophical backdrop of Descartes' remarks and the notions of freedom that commentators have used to characterize Descartes. The remainder of the paper is focused on the main current debate: Descartes' position on the relationship between freedom and determinism.

We re-examine Mersenne's critique of Giordano Bruno concerning the question of the extension of the universe and the plurality of worlds as well as that of universal animation. For this, it is necessary to distinguish, especially in the examination of the first question, the strictly cosmological problem from its metaphysical and theological foundation in which the relation between God and the universe is resolved. Mersenne's critique fundamentally concerns this second side of our problem, according to his conviction that Bruno repeats (...) the age-old errors of philosophical paganism and reaffirms an 'impiety' completely incompatible with Christian doctrine.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the reception of the Cartesian theory of eternal truths in Spinoza’s thought. As demonstrated by several occurrences in his works, he had a deep and articulated knowledge of Descartes’s doctrine. Unlike most of important philosophers of the period, Spinoza did not simply reject the theory, but he tried to incorporate and integrate it in his own reflection. For this reason, by accepting some of its premises – the centrality of God’s efficient causation, the creation of (...) both the essence and the existence of things –, Spinoza ended up by refuting its metaphysical consequences. (shrink)

(2013). Thomas Bradwardine on God and the Foundations of Modality. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 368-380. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.689754.

This paper offers a novel interpretation of Descartes's conception of freedom that resolves an important tension at the heart of his view. It does so by appealing to the important but overlooked distinction between possessing a power, exercising a power, and being in a position to exercise a power.