Cornelius Martini sull'oggetto della metafisica

In 1604 Cornelius Martini, as praesidis, had the text of a public disputatio de subiecto metaphysicae be printed, in which he re-examined a set of questions he had been working on since when, in 1597, he had been the first Lutheran philosopher to introduce metaphysics teaching in one of the universities funded in the spirit of Philipp Melanchton. The university was the Academia Julia at Helmstedt, whose foundations had been laid twenty years before by the statutes written on demand of the duke Julius von Braunschweig-Lüneburg by Martin Chemnitz and David Chyträus, both direct pupils of the Praeceptor Germaniae.Jean-François Courtine was the first to point out the role played by Martini in disseminating within Protestant Germany the positions of Late Mediavel and Renaissance Catholic metaphysicians, first and foremost of Aquinas and Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetanus. Martini did not yet refer to Francisco Suárez, though. Instead, Martini came up with a brilliant definition of the object opf metaphysics, which is entirely based on a consistent applucation of Jacopo Zabarella's epistemic operator modus considerationis: «intelligitur ens qua ens, non tantum universalitem entis ponere, sed addere modum illum formalis considerationis».