The title Descartes and the First Cartesians only partly reflects the scope of the research presented in Roger Ariew’s latest book. To be sure, this study does offer a new and extensive account of the work of the first Cartesians and thus a new perspective on the historical phenomenon that was seventeenth century Cartesianism. Yet it does so on the basis of a vast survey of the Scholastic context from which the new philosophy emerged. The investigation of Cartesianism is thus given shape by the inquiry into Scholasticism (somewhat vague at first, the term is subsequently presented in all its nuances). From this point of view, Descartes and the First Cartesians takes up and completes the research Ariew presented in his 1999 Descartes and the Last Scholastics. At first sight, then, the field surveyed is the transition from one way of doing philosophy, one that is reaching its end,...

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