“Suarez on Metaphysics and Science of the Categories”
Jorge J. E. Gracia and Sandro D'Onofrio

The twentieth century has been grappling for quite a while now with the issue concerned with the part of philosophy that studies categories. Some philosophers have argued that categories are studied in logic, others that they are studied in ontology, and still others that they are studied in metaphysics. In all cases, ways have been discussed of separating the study of categories from the study of other disciplines of learning, such as the natural sciences and other branches of philosophy. Among the authors who have staked out positions on this issue are Reinhardt Grossmann, Gustav Bergmann, and Alexius Meinong. A similar problem was posited by medieval authors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and continued to be actively explored and discussed well into the seventeenth century.

In this paper we first present the issues at stake. Then we turn to the views of Francisco Suarez. For him, two questions are particularly pertinent: First, what is it about categories that makes possible to gather their study into one discipline? Second, what discipline is concerned with them? The answers to these two questions have implications for the conceptions of metaphysics that Suarez favored and for the understanding of his overall philosophical program. Finally, we hope to draw some conclusions about the similarities and differences between what Suarez proposed and some contemporary views of these issues.