Suárez on the Contingency of Causal Origin

ABSTRACT Do individuals have their actual causal origins necessarily? Or could one and the same individual also have had a causal origin other than its actual one? Late medieval and early modern Aristotelians confront this question in the course of their discussions of the metaphysics of causation. In this paper, I discuss and evaluate Francisco Suárez's case for the view that causal origin is contingent, in the sense that the same individual that in fact proceeds from one cause could also have proceeded from some other cause of the same kind instead. I argue that his defense of this claim against his opponents is stronger, and philosophically more interesting, than appears at first. In particular, I argue that Suárez challenges the ontology of causal action presupposed by his opponents by invoking shared assumptions about truth and what we would now call truthmaking.