 By the time that Descartes wrote the Meditations, Clavius’ view concerning what he called the “preeminence” of mathematics was generally accepted. It was the prevailing view that something like Euclid’s theorems were time-tested to be demonstrably true. And indeed it was for this reason that Mersenne suggested to Descartes that he present his arguments in his Second Replies in geometrical fashion, in the form of Definitions, Postulates, Axioms, Common Notions, Propositions and Demonstrations (Dear 1995: 44–45). But at the end of the sixteenth century, Sanches would have none of it. Probably influenced by what he had read of  Carneades’  sceptical-empiricist critique of mathematics’ universal truths (cf. Cicero, Academica 2.116–118; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors Book III: “Against the Geometers”), Sanches anonymously challenged the  Platonist mathematics  of the most renowned mathematician of the age. In the guise of a modern day Carneades, Sanches wrote: