Sydney Penner

I am a Junior Research Fellow in philosophy at Merton College (home a very long while ago to most of the Oxford Calculators). My research focuses on a philosopher of the Spanish Golden Age, Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). Though he was long highly-regarded and was one of the primary conduits between medieval scholasticism and early modern philosophy, Suárez has been rather neglected in recent scholarship. I started out looking at his views in ethics, but I am also interested in his metaphysics.

In addition to Suárez, I am interested more generally in the history of ethics, especially the medieval and early modern periods. I am also interested in philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and epistemology, again especially as discussed in the medieval and early modern periods.

You can find a bit more about me here and a good deal more about my research here.

Updates

May 10, 2012

Created a page with links to online scans of many of the volumes of the Leonine edition of Aquinas. These scans are a nice complement to the searchable text of Aquinas at Corpus Thomisticum.

May 4, 2012

Uploaded a translation, albeit a somewhat rough one, of Arriaga's disputation on relations. It's a fascinating work from a scholastic philosopher very much influenced by Suarez but a great deal more willing to break with tradition than Suarez. Arriaga makes some compelling criticisms of Suarez's account of relations.

February 21, 2012

Added an entry to my papers page, uploaded some revised translations, and updated my page of links to online Suárez texts in Latin. The most significant addition there is that I finally have a link to the Index Rerum for the Vives Opera omnia.

January 18, 2012

Uploaded a translation of DM XXVII. Among other things, it contains some interesting discussions of the relationship between efficient and final causality.

October 25, 2011

The teaching section finally has content.

September 30, 2011

I am slowly making my way through the revisions of my translation of DM XXIII. I now have recently updated versions of sections 1-3 and 6 online.

September 26, 2011

Added two entries to my papers page.

August 27, 2011

Reworked the entire website: appearance is different, some of the content has been reorganised, and there is some new material. Incoming links should all have been redirected sensibly, but do let me know of any failures on that front.

August 17, 2011

Uploaded a translation of DM XLVIII.1. In addition to being where Suarez begins his explicit treatment of action, he provides a more detailed discussion here of Scotus's distinction between extrinsically and intrinsically occurring relations than he does in DM XLVII (the disputation on relations).

August 12, 2011

Uploaded a translation of DM XXX.1. Suarez comes as close here as any text that I'm aware of to a helpful explication of the notion of eminent containment.