How could Aristotle have read the spiritual exercises? Francisco de Toledo, Francisco Suárez and Manuel de Góis on Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ II 7­‑12

Abstract

For the first time ever, this paper aims at answering to the hypothetical question of the title dwelling on how three eminent Aristotelian Jesuit philosophers, Francisco de Toledo (+1596), Manuel de Góis (+1597), and Francisco Suárez (+1617) read one particular section of Aristotle’s’ De Anima II. Firstly, from the contribution of the Aristotelian doctrine of the senses, emerges an ontology of a consistent and diversified world. Dealing with the necessary passage from ontology to semiotics, the presence of the world to the senses will come out and hence the shift from psychology to cosmology. Such a shift, though in its version of a creatural metaphysics, will let us face anew the relationship between imagination (of the world) and a worldly or incarnated spirituality.