Intentional action for Suárez occurs as the voluntarium, which consists in the occurrence of actions either of the will itself or of other capacities or faculties motivated by the will. Now Suárez's general conception of action is one he fully shares with such influential scholastic predecessors as Scotus and Aquinas. It is natural for many people nowadays to view freedom and law simply as phenomena that are opposed or that are at least in profound tension with each other. On this view, the function of law is to impose necessary constraints on freedom; and human freedom in turn imposes limits on the constraints that law can justifiably impose. For Suárez, the basic or foundational kind of freedom is freedom as a two-way metaphysical power. The distinctiveness of Suárez's view of freedom and the place he gives it in his moral theory can be appreciated by contrasting him with Hobbes.

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.