In 1597 Francisco Suárez published a comprehensive treatise on beings of reason (entia rationis) as part of his Disputationes metaphysicae. Subsequent scholastic philosophers vigorously debated various aspects of Suárez’s theory. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the most controversial points of these debates, as they developed in the first half of the seventeenth century. In particular, I focus on the intension and the extension of ‘ens rationis’, its division (into negations, privations and relations of reason) and (...) its causes. Additionally, I will discuss how Suárez’s views sparked a number of debates within the classical view, debates which ultimately led to the emergence of various alternative theories, especially among the Jesuits. These non-classical views radically revise the previous classical conception of beings of reason. (shrink)

IT HAS BEEN SHOWN THAT SUÁREZ WAS THE WATERSHED for much of modern metaphysics understood as the science or the philosophy of being, or as ontology. Not only was he the first to write a systematic treatise in metaphysics that broke with the centuries-long tradition of commenting on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, but he also set metaphysics on a new course that was to define the parameters for ontology as the modern version of the ancient science of being as being. (...) Heidegger himself recognized this significance of Suárez for modern metaphysics, as he was beginning to work out his own reconstruction of a philosophy of being in terms of an ontological difference between be and being, when he wrote of Suárez as “putting the ontological problems into a systematic form for the first time, a form which determined a classification of metaphysics that lasted through subsequent centuries down to Hegel.” I would argue that Heidegger should have included himself in that classification, along with Wolff, Kant, and Hegel, even though he was trying to break out of it by positing the ontological difference as the basis for raising anew the modern question of being. (shrink)