Suárez on the Reduction of Categorical Relations
Skip other details (including permanent urls, DOI, citation information)This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. Please contact mpub-help@umich.edu to use this work in a way not covered by the license. :
For more information, read Michigan Publishing's access and usage policy.
Abstract
Francisco Suárez wrote one of the most thorough treatments in the Western philosophical tradition of the metaphysics of relations. Suárez, so I argue, is a reductivist about categorical relations, i.e., about the relations that make up one of the Aristotelian categories of being. One thing being similar to another requires nothing more than those two things and their non-relational qualities. Suárez is wary, however, of identifying too closely with earlier reductivists of the nominalist school, since he retains a pair of traditional commitments that he thinks they were too quick to jettison: namely, that two relata do not contribute equally to their relation and that there are non-mutual relations. The latter commitment in particular ends up leading Suárez down an unsatisfactory path.