ABSTRACT
When Rene Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy, philosophy was a broad subject that still encompassed natural science. From antiquity until Descartes's time, philosophers tended to think that metaphysics and epistemology had a hierarchical relationship. One view of philosophy saw it as working systematically through questions of metaphysics, moving on to epistemology, and then to more specific questions such as those posed by the natural sciences. Scholasticism was the tradition within which philosophy was taught during the High Middle Ages. Scholars generally consider the thirteenth-century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas to be the founder of scholasticism. In his work, Aquinas attempted to show that Aristotle's thought was compatible with Christian doctrine. Descartes's writing style was influenced by that of his near-contemporary Michel de Montaigne, whose philosophical Essais gave birth to the essay form. Montaigne's work was informed by his reading of the works of Sextus Empiricus, an ancient skeptical philosopher.
