Cartesian differential categories revisited

Abstract

We revisit the definition of Cartesian differential categories, showing that a slightly more general version is useful for a number of reasons. As one application, we show that these general differential categories are comonadic over Cartesian categories, so that every Cartesian category has an associated cofree differential category. We also work out the corresponding results when the categories involved have restriction structure, and show that these categories are closed under splitting restriction idempotents.