Francisco Suárez
(1548-1617)
Francisco Suárez is widely regarded as the last great Scholastic. He tried to combine the best ideas of
Thomas Aquinas,
John Duns Scotus, and
William of Ockham, which spanned the range from realism to nominalism.
Suárez is rightly considered a great
metaphysician. He was a rare thinker who made a metaphysical advance on the ancients, particularly in his widely read
Disputationes metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations), which very likely influenced
Gottfried Leibniz's thoughts on
identity.
Ever since
Aristotle, metaphysicians had debated about the
principle of individuation. Opinions varied as to whether it was matter or form, the body or a mind/soul that contains the unique seed of an individual person.
Plato and Aristotle thought all souls might be identical, so their materialization made them distinct individuals. The Stoics thought it was the
pneuma or spirit that brought the peculiar qualities of an individual to an undifferentiated substance (matter). For Suárez, real beings have both an existence and an essence.
Suárez wrote:
Every individual is individuated by its total entity (omne individuum sua tota indivuatur).
('On individual unity and its principle'. Disputationes metaphysicae, § V )
Information philosophy shows that Suárez was correct. It is the total entity, including its concrete matter and its abstract information, that makes each living thing a unique individual.
Since both matter and information
change as the individual grows and eventually dies, the uniqueness that
persists over an individual's lifetime is first, its evolutionary genetic inheritance (DNA), and second, the memorable experiences stored in the
Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR), the developmental history of the organism. This is the combination that modern biology calls "Evo-Devo."
At death, the matter survives, according to the conservation of matter. But second, according to the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy increases as the matter decays, destroying much of the negative entropy (
information) in the process.
What does not survive death, despite the speculations of the ancients and the beliefs of many religions, is the
immaterial information, the closest thing to the idea of a spirit or soul of the individual, unless it has been stored externally as part of the
sum of human
knowledge, in which case the individual achieves a measure of
information immortality.
On Free Will
Suárez' aesthetic theory (
De Bonitate) claimed that our judgement of goodness or badness should depend on the mode of production of an artifact. Two objects that appear identical need different standards of judgement. His example was a stone carved by a sculptor and a stone that broke away and fell off a cliff but resembled the sculpture perfectly.
Suárez' moral theory similarly depends on an element of
voluntarism in each act. Good or bad can be judged independently of of divine commands or prohibitions. Those divine commands are the result of free actions by God's own will, the radical view of Ockham and Scotus that led to British empiricism. We have to go out and study the world to understand God's creation.
Rationalists like
Descartes and
Spinoza followed Aquinas in holding that God is constrained to act according to his own natural law. All is completely
determined. Reason alone, study and work in the ivory tower, can explain the entire world.
Wikipedia on Suárez
Stanford Encyclopedia on Suárez
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