By a method Hadot does not render adequately clear, our universities have inherited the scholastic form and proceeded in it. Hadot talks about Montaigne, Descartes, and Kant as up to date philosophers who have taken up the customary beginning, and sprints off a agent register of other ones (which should to encompass more British thinkers, for example Smith and Hume, and encompasses Marx when it should not), until one starts to have the effect that only the medieval scholastics and their professorial heirs--or possibly the organisation of the university itself--are the culprits ...