The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by
colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of
original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and
philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They
focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific
thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli,
Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico.
Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and those by Robert
Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in
any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a
title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is
central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of
the topics with which that book deals.