Forthcoming from Oxford University Press:

The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez

Date of Publish: ?
Date available in store: ?
Book Content: 11 Chapters

Abstract: Chapter 3 [pdf download]
Author: Christopher Shields (Oxford University)

Shadows of Being: Francisco Suárez’s Entia Rationis

Francisco Suárez devotes the last of his fifty-four Metaphysical Disputations (DM) to beings of reason (entia rationis), those troublesome creatures which flummox us by their unstable existential demands: when we say that the gryphon does not exist, we are met straightaway with the question of what we are talking about when we so speak. Although a fair bit of what he says seems at least initially to suggest a Meinongean solution to the problem of non-existents, Suárez’s treatment of beings of reason in fact proves both more difficult to classify and also far more nuanced than so much would suggest. Ultimately, Suárez seeks to treat an ens rationis as a non-existent subject of an existing extrinsic denomination, or, more precisely, as that to which an extrinsic denomination would attach if there were something really existing as a subject for that extrinsic denomination. On this approach, which we may term the tethered counterfactual approach—tethered because entia rationis are perforce tied to acts of intellection and counterfactual because these acts treat them as if they existed though they do not—entia rationis, despite their non-existence, may be implicated in the causal nexus.