Quasi-Absolute Time in Francisco Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations

Abstract

Suárez's discussion of time in the Metaphysical Disputations is one of the earliest long treatises on time(extending over sixty pages), and includes detailed arguments supporting the view that physical actions takeplace within an absolute temporal reference frame. Whereas some previous thinkers, such as John DunsScotus and Peter Aureole, had made tantalising suggestions that time exists independently of physicalchanges, their ideas were primarily negative theses in response to perceived problems with the dominantview that time was caused by the celestial motion. Suárez, in contrast, provides a positive thesis based on hisrevision of traditional, Scholastic metaphysics. He argues that the ordering of earlier and later events canonly be understood by conceiving events as existing within the embrace of a ‘flowing and successive space’which he refers to as ‘entirely necessary and immutable in its own flux’ (omnino necessarium et immutabilein suo fluxu) - something at least very like an absolute temporal reference frame. Yet it would be simplisticto describe Suárez's work on time only in terms of its nascent absolutism, since for him there is a secondkind of time, a more properly ‘real’ time, which is an accident of material being. This kind of time isontologically tied to the most intimate existence of objects, creating a plurality of individual continua oftime - one for each distinct being. He calls this kind of time ‘intrinsic time’ (tempus intrinsecum). Suárez's dualistic account of time, in which he proposes an ‘intrinsic time’, linked to being, which exists within a second order absolute temporal reference frame, or ‘imaginary succession’, forms a bridge betweenscholasticism and early modern philosophy providing a foundation for the work of later absolutists likeGassendi and Newton.