Descartes among the Scholastics takes the position that philosophical systems cannot be studied adequately apart from their intellectual context: philosophers accept, modify, or reject doctrines whose meaning and significance are given in a particular culture. Thus, the volume treats Cartesian philosophy as a reaction against, as well as an indebtedness to, scholastic philosophy and touches on many topics shared by Cartesian and late scholastic philosophy: matter and form, causation, infinity, place, time, void, and motion; the substance of the heavens; principles of metaphysics (such as unity, principle of individuation, truth and falsity). One moves from within Cartesian philosophy and its intellectual context in the seventeenth century, to living philosophical debate between Descartes and his contemporaries, to its first reception.

Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 1