ABSTRACT
The Aristotelian idea of assimilation dominated epistemological debates far into the seventeenth century and played an important role in controversies about the relationship between causation and cognition. Francisco Suarez presents his own theory of cognition as an alternative to the theories that were available in his time. The first theory he considers is the Platonic theory that takes the human intellect to be an immaterial entity that is distinct from the body and has innate knowledge of all things. Suarez is not the only commentator on scholastic theories of cognition who takes them to be deeply flawed. The scholastic theories all assumed that a material input needs to be mapped onto or transformed into an immaterial output, but neglected to identify the appropriate transducer that can do this. The objection correctly points out that Suarez posits an underlying and coordinating soul, thereby introducing an additional entity.
