Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

Date of Award

Fall 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Philosophy

College

College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

First Advisor

Richard Lee

Abstract

In the Metaphysical Disputations (1597), Francisco Suárez asserts that the human intellect, because it is imperfect, must make use of determinate mental fictions in order to know “real being” (ens reale). In this dissertation, I reconstruct why and how this should be the case. I show that the supreme imperfection of our intellect implies our embodiment, which in turn implies our inability to know any being entirely as it is in itself. To compensate for this inability, we humans must make use of both “beings of reason” (entia rationis) and “nonbeings of reason” (non entia rationis). In the process of discovery or abstraction, we use distinctions of reason, relations of reason, and positive negations in order to generate universal concepts of singular beings’ essences, properties, and divisions. In the process of teaching or explication, we use the same mental fictions in order to rearrange these concepts, such that the properties and divisions necessarily follow from the essences. This interpretation constitutes a novel contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the status of the supertranscendental in Suárez and post-Suárezian philosophy. Suárez does not posit a supertranscendental concept of being somehow inclusive of both real being and being of reason. But he does both thematize and utilize a supertranscendental method for the study of being, in which our sole mode of access to knowledge of the real is nothing other than our artful use of the fictive.

Download

Included in

Philosophy Commons

Share

COinS