The Literary Format of Descartes's Meditations on First Philosophy is undoubtedly one of its more distinguishing features. During the seventeenth century, the standard convention for a work in metaphysics was a treatise or disputation. Descartes's conversational tone, writing in the first person present tense, and unique organization of chapters into "meditations," was clearly a departure from the norm. At first glance, given the sentiments expressed in the work's dedicatory letter and preface, the unconventional writing style appears to be a rhetorical (...) device. As architect for the new science, Descartes was certainly eager to gain approval for his philosophical agenda from the proper authorities, such as the .. (shrink)

Shortly after he was banished for heresy from his nation-state of Prussia in 1723, Christian Wolff published an overview of his philosophical system, known in English as the Preliminary Discourse [1728]. In the last chapter of this work, Wolff gives an extended argument for the importance and necessity of academic freedom. In the paper, I reconstruct and evaluate Wolff’s argument and maintain that the strength of Wolff’s view resides in his naïve optimism for intellectual discourse.