Between rationalism and empiricism there is only one middle ground, denoted by various terms, some more counterproductive than others. Aristotelianism, Thomism, Scholasticism, metaphysical realism, moderate realism, and similar labels are, like all labels, apt to create miscomprehensions. Moreover, those who call themselves Thomists represent nowadays a motley lot indeed, if they were ever really unified. Aristotelians, old and new, also form disparate classes. In one respect all of them are one, at least in modern times. Apart from avoiding the question, “Is there a universe?,” they also say little about that largest of all conceivable objects. A rather striking disparity when seen against the large number of textbooks on cosmology, a subject, and even a label, which Scholastic philosophers had held as their exclusive domain for over two centuries until they ceded it to scientists.

Neglect by Scholastic philosophers of the universe as such is all the more surprising because a very different pattern was set for them by Christian Wolff. Those aware of the prodigious (though just as prolix) productivity of Wolff could expect something on a grand scale after Wolff published, in 1728, his Discursus praeliminaris de philosophia in genere, or the program of his philosophical synthesis. There he declared that “there is also a general understanding of the world which explains those things which are common to the existing world and to any other possible world. That part of philosophy which develops these general and abstract notions I call transcendental or general cosmology.”