Francisco Suarez Selections from De Anima

Suarez’s De Anima is his second most important philosophical work after his celebrated Metaphysical Disputations, and like the Disputations, it is incredibly thorough. Indeed, it is the most complete treatment of the nature of living beings from an Aristotelian point of view ever penned. In it Suarez treats questions we would now ascribe to such separate disciplines as metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of biology. The selections translated here, the first English translation of any part of the De anima, give the reader a good sample of some of the central metaphysical questions treated in the De anima. The first selection, consisting of all of Disputation I, provides Suarez’s solution to difficult questions concerning the nature of the soul in general; specifically it addresses the way it is first act, its quiddita-tive definition, and its relation to the body, the composite, and the essential accidents of the living organism it partially constitutes. The second selection, consisting of question 3 of Disputation 2, reviews and defends all the philoso-phical arguments, whether metaphysical or moral, found in the Christian tradition for the conclusion that the rational soul is immaterial and immortal.