Abstract

It is acknowledged that Francisco Suarez had an excellent knowledge of the Medieval Scholastic tradition. In this project, I focus on one topic, human knowledge of material singulars, to determine Suarez's debt to and freedom from the Scholastic tradition. The representative thinkers of the Medieval tradition that I consider are Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. ;In the first two Chapters, I consider the accounts of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the issue of knowledge of singulars. I show that both Scotus and Ockham try to distance themselves from the analysis of indirect knowledge of material singulars presented by Aquinas. Although Scotus retains the notion that the universal nature is the first object of the intellect, his stress on the autonomy of the intellect in its relation to sense cognition paved the way for Ockham. Notably, Ockham rejects any account of knowledge that requires intermediary representational species, and consequently adopts a position that stresses the intellect's ability to know singulars directly via intuitive cognition. ;In the final two Chapters, I discuss in detail Suarez's account of knowledge of material singulars. I show that Suarez accepts Ockham's basic arguments for the priority of knowledge of the singular but at the same time retains the necessity of intelligible species. His account of the relationship between sense cognition and intellectual cognition owes some debt to Scotus, but Suarez accents the theme of the autonomy of the intellect to an extremely high degree. Furthermore, he rejects Ockham's account of intuitive cognition, positing instead a theory of cognition that requires representational species at every step in the cognitive process, both sensory and intellectual. Consequently, Suarez presents us with a highly nuanced and extremely consistent account of knowledge that leaves no explanatory "gaps."