Suárez on Aristotelian Causality offers the first comprehensive account of Francisco Suárezâs position with respect to the four Aristotelian causes in his Metaphysical Disputations. Suárez deals with these causes in the greater part of Metaphysical Disputations 12â27 approximately a third of his famous work on metaphysics. Nevertheless, no previous attempt at analysis of causality as a part of his overall metaphysical position has been offered.
The material, formal, efficient and final cause as understood by Suárez each receives a chapter in this volume just as his general account of causality is considered. This should be relevant to anyone interested in the role and pertinence of Aristotelian causality for Suárezâs metaphysics.
Contributors (in order of appearance) are Jakob Leth Fink, Erik à kerlund, Kara Richardson, Stephan Schmid and Sydney Penner.
Jakob Leth Fink, Ph.D. (2009) University of Copenhagen, holds a position as Research Fellow at the University of Gothenburg in the Representation and Reality in the Aristotelian Tradition Project. Editor of The Development of Dialectic from Plato to Aristotle (Cambridge, 2012) and, with Heine Hansen and Ana MarÃa Mora-Márquez, Logic and Language in the Middle Ages: A Volume in Honour of Sten Ebbesen (Leiden, 2013).
Acknowledgements vi
Note to the Reader vii
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Jakob L. Fink
1 Suárez on Aristotelian Causality 23
Jakob L. Fink
2 Material Causality â Dissolving a Paradox: The Actuality of Prime Matter in Suárez 43
Erik à kerlund
3 Formal Causality: Giving Being by Constituting and Completing 64
Kara Richardson
4 Efficient Causality: The Metaphysics of Production 84
Stephan Schmid
5 Final Causality: Suárez on the Priority of Final Causation 121
Sydney Penner
Bibliography 149
Students and scholars of early modern and late scholastic metaphysics; students and scholars of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617).