Division, object and abstraction of speculative sciences according to Francisco Suárez

Abstract

During the last decades of the twentieth century, Francisco Suárez’s philosophy was part of a scholastic movement commonly referred to as Thomistic School. The approach perspective, as it is commonly known, placed the speculative position of Suarez closer to the one of the Dominican St. Thomas Aquinas, according to the following nuances: a. in the epistemic sphere, the figure of St. Thomas widely overshadowed that of Suarez, which promoted an authentic disregard of his original thesis; b. like Thomas Aquinas, the Spanish Jesuit founded the division of speculative sciences in the intellectual act of abstraction; c. the difference between both metaphysical ideas did not necessarily imply a different epistemic understanding. However, in the 21st century, there appears another text which emphasizes the crucial difference of the Jesuit’s philosophy of the 16th century, who, in medieval letters, writes and thinks in permanent tension between the inheritance of the ancient and medieval philosophy on the one hand, and a neo-scholasticism with Renaissance airs on the other. Therefore, although his thinking goes through an Aristotelian tradition of knowledge, the understanding of science is based on an objective base, unlike Thomas Aquinas. Based on this premise, the following research work will exclusively deal with the epistemic originality of Suarez, following the division of speculative and real sciences, and in this way, which shows the order, the principle, and the existing relations between the physical, mathematical and metaphysical sciences.