Francisco Suárez on Pain and Touch

Abstract

In the study the author aims at two main things. First, he points out an (at least) potential doctrinal incoherence in Suárez’s statements concerning the issue of the proper sensible object of touch. While in the context of his treatment of the sense of touch in DA VII, 13-14 Suárez restricts the total object of touch to external (tangent) qualities, in DA XI, 2, when treating the issue of emotions, the Jesuit includes also the qualitas dolorifera, i.e., a quality inherent in the percipient’s body. The author states that Suárez’s inconsistence is more urgent if his formulations are compared with those of Francisco de Oviedo. Second, the author indicates that Suárez’s «mixed view of pain», combining both the perceptual and the affective aspects in the single experience of pain, is a kind of theory that can be regarded as an up-to-date position even in the contemporary debate among analytic philosophers.