Francisco Suarez

Home CV Papers What I'm reading Suarez Texts Other links Contact info: sfp26 [at] cornell [dot] edu The Sage School of Philosophy 218 Goldwin Smith Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853

Francisco Suarez

1. Online biographies and bibliographies
2. Suarez on Google Book Search
3. Other online texts
4. Early editions
5. Secondary literature

(Suggestions for further material to add here would, of course, be welcome.)

Online biographies and bibliographies

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a short entry on Suarez. It at least provides a quick outline of his life; the summary of his philosophical positions strikes me as not the most useful.

If you read German, the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexicon provides a short biography, as well as a lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The formatting of the bibliography, though, will ensure that you get a headache while reading it.

The best online bibliography is provided by Scholasticon. It is remarkably thorough and was being updated at least until Jul. 2008. Scholasticon also provides a brief biography in French.

Suarez on Google Book Search

Google Book Search has scanned a copy of the Vives edition of the Opera omnia and put most of it online. Given that print copies seem to be in scarce supply, this could be a very useful resource. Unfortunately, there are several problems that limit its usefulness. First, it is hard to actually find the books via searches. I have never yet managed to locate them by author or title searches, for example. The only way I have been able to get them to show up is by searching for strings of text from the body of the volumes. But this does not work well either, since the OCR misidentifies letters in close to half of the words. That, of course, points to a second limitation. A searchable text of Suarez would be very useful indeed, but, as it is, Google Book Searches copy does not really count as a searchable text even though it provides the option of seeing the pages in text rather than images. Third, even once one has located the volumes, the identifying information fails to indicate what volume you are looking at, so you actually have to load the pdf files (which are very large and hence slow) before being able to identify the volumes. Fourth, the automatic page turner was clearly having difficulties, since some of the volumes are missing many pages. Fifth, in at least once case (v. 25), dozens of pages are out of order. Sixth, some of the volumes for some reason are not still not accessible online, even though it looks like they have been scanned and it is clear that there are no copyright restrictions on them.

Of course, a number of these problems may well be rectified by Google at some point. But at the moment (Jul. 2008), there are some frustrating limitations to the usefulness of these scans. Still, they can be really useful on occasions where one does not have access to a print copy, especially since the entire volumes can be downloaded to one's hard drive. For texts that are available elsewhere online, I would recommend those over these (see next section). In an effort to overcome the difficulty in locating and identifying the volumes, I've provided a list of links below to each volume. As long as Google does not change the numerical identifiers for them, the following links should work (the titles in the parentheses, where included, indicate which works the given volume contains):

Other online texts

Thanks to the work of Salvador Castellote, Jean-Paul Coujou, John P. Doyle, and Michael Renemann, the entire text of the Disputationes Metaphysicae is available in a searchable format. It is in html, so the files are a reasonable size and quick to work with. It is also in much, much better shape than the Google scan, which is especially plagued with missing and out of order pages. Still, there is the occasional error (see, e.g., my text of DM XIV.1 for examples of the kind of errors that need to be corrected), so if a sentence looks odd, it is worth checking it elsewhere. If possible, check it against the 1597 edition (see below), since it contains fewer errors than either this online text or the Vives edition.

Prof. Castellote also has texts of De Anima and De Generatione et Corruptione available on his website. The De Anima text is his critical edition. It is worth noting that this is in some sense not the same text as the De Anima in the Vives edition. Suarez started editing his De Anima commentary for publication at the end of his life but only got around to editing the first twelve chapters of the first book. The Vives edition incorporates that later material. On the assumption that Suarez might have changed some of his views in the intervening years, the resulting text may not be wholly coherent. Regardless of their respective merits, one should keep in mind that matters are not quite as straightforward as saying that Castellote's edition is a critical edition of the same text that is in the Vives edition.

Alfred Freddoso has several brief unpublished translations available: the preface to the DM, the introduction to DM I, and De Legibus book 2, chap. 6.

Robert Pasnau has a translation of DM XL, sect. 2 on his site.

Finally, I have put up a number of texts here.

Early editions

If you want to look at some of the early editions of Suarez, you're in luck. Good quality scans of a number of his works are available, thanks to several European libraries. I won't list them here, since they're already listed with links at "An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Texts." And you need to know about that great resource anyway. Notably, you can find a link to the valuable 1597 edition of Disputationes Metaphysicae here.

Secondary literature

If you are looking for a particular piece on Suarez and do not have ready access to it, feel free to email me to see if I have it. I have built up a significant collection of secondary literature on Suarez and have a goodly number of pieces in PDF, including some that are rather difficult to obtain.

Sydney Penner