Abstract

The bibliographical history offers an interesting point of view for a better understanding of the rise and development of ontology, as an autonomous discipline, in early modern thought. After Luther’s interdict, the metaphysics was neglected in many protestant academies and excluded from the disciplinary classifications. The return of metaphysics, at the end of the 16thcentury, coincided, in many cases, with the affirmation of the new scholastic paradigm of ontology. An illustrious precedent of this paradigm was constituted by the Jesuit Francisco Suárez and his Disputationes metaphysicae. The Jesuit models - not only that by Suárez, but also those by Benet Perera and Pedro da Fonseca - represented the standard on which Calvinists and Lutherans built their own metaphysics in an ontological way. This paper provides a conspicuous number of case studies in which the passage from metaphysics to ontology becomes definitively clear: this debate takes place throughout the first handbooks, treatises, magisterial and doctoral disputations proposed by the Calvinist and Lutheran authors