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SUÁREZ, Francisco, SJ. The Metaphysical Demonstration of the Existence of God: Metaphysical Disputations 28-29. Translated and edited by John P. Doyle. South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2004. xxiv + 170. Cloth, $30.00-Francisco Suárez's Metaphysical Disputations, first published in Salamanca in 1597, are his most important and influential work, containing summaries of his own thought and that of previous scholastics in systematic form. Many of the Metaphysical Disputations have been translated into English, but it was a surprise to me that Disputations 28 and 29, which are certainly of central importance to Suarezian metaphysics, had not previously been translated into English. The Englishspeaking scholarly world, however, is certainly fortunate in having the present translation that has been produced by one of the world's most well-informed students of Suárez, John P. Doyle, of Saint Louis University, who has devoted much of his scholarly career to the study of Jesuit philosophers, such as Suárez, and is an accomplished translator of late medieval philosophical texts into quite readable English, despite the difficulty of Suárez's Latin text and the difficulty of the subject matter.
The present volume contains a sixteen-page introduction that briefly sums up Suárez's life and works, outlines the contents of the Metaphysical Disputations, and then presents a summary of...