Introducing the philosophical thought of Christian Wolff (1679-1754) in 1990, Michel Puech pointed out that: "The idea of seeking the metaphysics of new physics is [...] not an invention of Kant's; it occupied metaphysics for half a century before Kant". Even today, this remark has arguably gone unheeded, as historians of philosophy are so obsessed with the reception of Kantian problematization that they tend to block philosophical questioning. Admittedly, Kantian problematization seems to mark an absolute break, but it doesn't appear out of thin air. What's more, it wasn't the only one possible in its context, and in the face of the difficulties it set out to tackle, it gave rise to others, just as considerable.
