Anselm’s ontological proof of God is obvious, and it is not improbable that
Descartes knew of Augustine’s prior use of the cogito against skepticism. What
was important for Descartes was that he could proceed through a chain of
demonstration which led to the knowledge of substance, and thence of attrib-
ute, bodily extension, and the properties of material objects, which made up
the contents of his science. (This is developed most explicitly in Principles
1.51–76.) Not only did this procedure draw on some of the leading conceptions
of scholasticism; but also Descartes made his move at just the time when
scholastic philosophy was being modernized in its home camp. Suarez, the
most famous of the Jesuit thinkers, had recently formulated metaphysics as an
independent field rather than a commentary on Aristotle. The term ontology
first appears in 1636 in scholastic circles—almost simultaneously with Des-
cartes’s epoch-symbolizing Discours de la Méthode—reflecting Suarez’s posi-
tion that being as such is the first philosophy, before theology and before the
categories and contingent contents of experience. Not only is this approach
implicit in Descartes’s starting point; Descartes also carried Suarez’s Disputa-
tiones Metaphysicae (1597) on his travels, although he virtually never cited
Suarez or any other scholastic (EP, 1967: 5:542; 8: 30–32).
If we defocus from Descartes personally, we can see that the “philosophical
revolution” which set off modern philosophy was a transformation, not an
abolition, of the medieval field. Descartes’s ideology of a new beginning hides
the revival of a long-standing metaphysical problem space. Spinoza, Leibniz,
Wolff, Kant—the whole tradition of “rationalism” is not merely Cartesian; all
draw heavily on a purified scholasticism. The new era of philosophical crea-
tivity builds upon the capital of the older era, even as the energy of creation
comes from a new set of tensions structuring the intellectual community. The
space which constitutes philosophy does not disappear when the techniques of
rapid-discovery science give the latter heightened noticeability and prestige.
From now on philosophers are concerned to negotiate and define their bounda-
ries with science, much as they were previously concerned with their bounda-
ries with theology. Both borders now become the external sources of action in
modern philosophy.
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