Early Modern Philosophy Working Group Meeting: Tad Schmaltz, 'Was Suárez an Essentialist in Metaphysics?'

The Second Meeting of the Early Modern Philosophy Working Group, a Rackham Interdisciplinary Working Group, will be held on Tuesday, 12 November, at 4 pm in 2271 Angell Hall 

    The meeting will involve the presentation of a talk, titled 'Was Suárez an Essentialist in Metaphysics?', by Professor Tad Schmaltz. A brief abstract is as follows: 

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I examine the thesis that the early modern scholastic Francisco Suárez offers an “essentialist” form of metaphysics that is distinctively “modern”. I start with a consideration of the highly influential version of this thesis in the work of the historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson. Gilson’s view that Suárez takes metaphysics to be concerned exclusively with essences as merely possible entities may seem to have considerable support in the early sections of Suárez’s Metaphysical Disputations. However, I take the discussion later in this text to indicate rather the “existentialist” position that merely possible essences must be grounded in actual existence. In closing, I follow Gilson in comparing Suárez’s metaphysics to the view in a precritical text from Kant, though the connection I emphasize is very different from the one that Gilson finds to be significant.