Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Summa quadripartita that Descartes Never Wrote

Abstract

Roger Ariew’s new book, Descartes and the First Cartesians will not be a methodological surprise for those who already read his previous work, Descartes and the Last Scholastics, as well as its expanded version, Descartes Among the Scholastics. But Descartes and the First Cartesians not only revisits interesting stuff, it also presents new material and does so in a new way. To put it bluntly there are at least two novelties in Descartes and the First Cartesians. First, it takes into account not only scholastics, but as the very title of the book indicates, the “First Cartesians”: Ariew’s heroes here are Jacques Du Roure, Antoine Le Grand, and Pierre-Sylvain Regis. the second novelty of Descartes and the First Cartesians, amounts to highlighting the idea that philosophy should be presented in textbooks, that is, as summae quadripartitae. Because of this idea, Ariew applies the category “First Cartesians” not so much to the Cartesians who were the first to follow Descartes’ doctrine from a chronological point of view, as to those who were the first to carry out Descartes’ unfinished project of writing a textbook in Latin.