John Adam Scherzer's Axiomata Resoluta is a remarkably complete enumeration and defense of core principles of Scholastic Philosophy. It is somewhat like Aquinas's celebrated On Being and Essence but is broader in scope and arguably clearer in statement. Anyone who is somewhat puzzled by things Aquinas says about the relations of genera to species and of specific essences to individuals, as well as about the ways in which genera and species are both like and unlike form and matter, will profit from a careful reading of the Axiomata. The work brings out, in a particularly luminous way, the centrality of the notions of potency and act to all Scholastic Philosophy, and shows that the Schoolmen, though realists and essentialists, were well aware of the fact that humans can come to know something about the essences of things only in a round about and imperfect way. Leibniz scholars will be particularly interested in it since, at several points, it indicates the ways in which Scherzer's thought may have influenced Leibniz, Scherzer's pupil at Leipzig. These are discussed in the introduction to the translation and in several of its explanatory notes.
