This chapter is devoted to a consideration of the role that three axioms such as causal containment axiom (CCA), conservation-is-creation axiom (C-I-CA), and universal causation axiom (UCA), play in the Meditations. It also explores the ways in which the axioms are indebted to, but also deviate from, early modern scholastic discussions of causation, emphasizing in particular the discussion in the Metaphysical Disputations of the early modern Jesuit Francisco Suárez. This text, which was known to Descartes, includes what is perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of causation in the early modern period. Descartes attempts to respond to scholastic objections to the implication of the UCA by denying that it requires that God is an efficient cause of his own existence. In contrast to the case of the first two axioms, this axiom is meant to expand the notion of causation beyond the paradigmatic case of efficient causality.

This chapter traces two sets of arguments given by Suárez in Metaphysical Disputations xv. In the first set he confronts arguments intended to show that substantial forms do not, or indeed cannot, exist. Several of these arguments foreshadow in fairly obvious ways the arguments later deployed by Boyle, Locke, and others writing under their influence. Suárez has a clear if somewhat idiosyncratic conception of substantial form, one articulated, understandably enough, within the framework of his general Aristotelian hylomorphism. Suárez begins his consideration of the anti-substantial form position directly, even rather bluntly. It is important to bear in mind that Suárez's arguments on behalf of substantial form may be judged from two radically different vantage points. There are those who simply deny the phenomena, who think, for example, that there simply are no data of co-incidence, property subordination, or systemic equilibrium to be explained.

This chapter examines Francisco Suárez's view of transcendentals and categories as explored in his most significant work, Metaphysical Disputations. Even a glance into the contents of this work reveals that both transcendentals and categories lie at the center of Suárez's metaphysics. The chapter considers transcendentals, asking what they are and about their identity, number, and order. It then takes up categories, what they are and their identity, number, and relations. Like his scholastic predecessors, Suárez holds that categories are primarily diverse, which means that they share no property or genus. The aim of science from an Aristotelian-scholastic perspective is the possession of certain knowledge of truth, acquired by demonstration. For Suárez, metaphysics is the science of the transcendentals, which was a view first proposed by Scotus. In this Suárez's metaphysics manifests a fundamentally Scotistic character in spite of many real and apparent disagreements with Scotus on particular issues.