Cartesian Metaphysics: The Scholastic Origins of Modern Philosophy

This is the first book-length study of Descartes’s metaphysics to place it in its immediate historical context, the Late Scholastic philosophy of thinkers such as Suárez against which Descartes reacted. Jorge Secada views Cartesian philosophy as an ‘essentialist’ reply to the ‘existentialism’ of the School, and his discussion includes careful analyses and original interpretations of such central Cartesian themes as the role of scepticism, intentionality and the doctrine of the material falsity of ideas, universals and the relation between sense and understanding, causation and the proofs of the existence of God, the theory of substance, and the dualism of mind and matter. His study offers a picture of Descartes’s metaphysics that is both novel and philosophically illuminating.

• First book-length study of Descartes to put him in the context of Late Scholastic philosophy • Offers original analyses of central themes in Cartesian studies • Offers sustained discussion of Suárez, a philosopher whose importance is increasingly being recognised

Part I. The Unity of Cartesian Metaphysics: 1. Descartes’s essentialist metaphysics; 2. Scepticism, Scholasticism and the origins of Descartes’s philosophy; 3. Cartesian real essences; Part II. Ideas and the Road from Essence to Existence: 4. Ideas and the world in mind; 5. My wax, my intellect and I; 6. Essentialism and the existence of God; Part III. Cartesian Substances: 7. The substantial tension; 8. The essence and the existence of Cartesian substances; 9. The real distinction or the body and the mind.

\'Secada\'s book is rich and interesting, and can be read with much profit.\'

– The British Journal for the History of Philosophy