the size of the thing

To get some taste of just how large Suárez’s project was, THE WHOLE OF THE LATIN IS ONLINE HERE.

Those of us who aren’t in Leibniz’s fortunate position of being able to read Suárez’s Latin as if it were a novel have to content ourselves with smatterings of existing English, French, and German translations.

Normally I don’t read philosophy at the same time as writing it. It is too easy to become contaminated by the concerns of others and imagine that they are intimately one’s own. And though a large part of development in philosophy is about reading the concerns of others and growing into them so that they become our own concerns, the midst of writing one’s own work is not the best time to do that. (This is why I’m studiously avoiding digging into Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine just yet, even though I have it set up in a special place on the dining room table.)

I make an exception in Suárez’s case, partly because he’s such a far-off figure that there’s little risk of starting to write or think exactly like him at the wrong moment, and partly because he’s a great motivator– I can’t think of anyone who took systematic metaphysics more seriously than he did.

Suárez was born in 1548, the same year as Giordano Bruno. Has there ever been a case of two philosophers born in the same year who were so utterly different in all intellectual and personal respects? 1859 was the birth year of Bergson, Dewey, and Husserl, a very good year for philosophers, but whatever their differences you can find some pretty obvious points of similarity between them. But Suárez and Bruno belong on two different planets.