Throughout the early modern period, the vast majority of natural philosophers remained deeply invested in exploring the meaning of ancient philosophical texts—there was no anti-humanist turn initiated by Descartes. Discussion of ancient philosophy was used, above all, in a genealogical manner, to shed light on the historical origins of doctrinal or methodological error. Accordingly, calls for a “return” to the philosophy of the presocratics, of Hippocrates, etc., should not be understood as simplistic recourse to authority, but rather as historico-methodological arguments about the disciplinary identity of natural philosophy. Indeed, natural-philosophical innovators were often more sure of what they stood against than what exactly they stood for. Seen from this perspective, the “philosophy of the Scientific Revolution” was an anti-philosophy, driven primarily by the colonization of the discipline by physicians on the one hand and mixed mathematicians on the other; the two groups eventually coming to work in tandem to squeeze out anything that looked like metaphysical physics.