6 Metaphysics The Metaphysics of Suarez t was through the Disputationes Metaphysicae of Francisco Suarez, directly or indirectly, that the metaphysics of the medieval scholastics became known to the philosophers of the early modern age Suarez was well acquainted with the works of his medieval predecessors, and he summarized their views, codiWed their positions, and built up his own system by choosing options from the menu that they oVer A summary of the main positions of the Disputationes accordingly provides a good starting point for a consideration of the metaphysics of our period Suarez starts from Aristotle’s deWnition of the subject as the discipline that studies being qua being He expands on this by oVering a classiWcation of diVerent types of being, proceeding by a series of dichotomies First there is the division between inWnite being and Wnite being, or, as he often says, between ens a se (that which has being of itself ) and ens ab alio (that which has being from elsewhere) The creaturely world of Wnite being is then divided Wrst of all into substance and accident Substances are things like stars and dogs and pebbles which subsist on their own; accidents are entities like brightness, Werceness, and hardness which exist only by inhering in substances and have no independent history We can proceed further if we wish by subdividing substances into living and non-living, and living substances into animal and vegetable and so on; we can also identify at least nine diVerent kinds of accidents corresponding to Aristotle’s categories But such further division will take us outside the scope of general metaphysics, which operates at the most abstract level All these items are beings, but metaphysics is interested in studying them only qua beings The I