Suárez on Visual Perception

Abstract

This paper surveys the main issues in Suárez’s theory of visual perception, which in its complexity and systematical ordering has not been explored yet. These questions, exposed in the first five questions of the seventh disputation De sensibus exterioribus in particulari of Suárez’s Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis and in the first two sections of the fifth disputation De potentiis cognoscitivis in communi, are the following: 1) the nature of light; 2) the nature of colour; 3) the formal (adequate) object of vision; 4) the necessity and the nature of the visual species; 5) the critique of the theory of extramission; and 6) the organ of visual power. The main emphasis is laid on the presentation of the systematical dimension of Suárez’s visual theory.