Desgabets, Robert (1610–1678)

Summary

Born in Ancemont, France, Desgabets was a Benedictine monk who taught and defended Cartesian philosophy after Descartes’ death in 1650 until his own death in 1678. His published works of philosophical interest are Considérations sur l’état présent de la controverse, his development of Descartes’ views on the Eucharist, and Critique de la Critique de la recherche de la vérité, his criticism of Simon Foucher's criticism of Malebranche's Search after Truth. His work on the Eucharist heightened the worry that Cartesianism conflicted with the teachings of the church (his Benedictine superiors forced him to renounce this work). And his criticism of Foucher displayed fundamental misunderstandings of Malebranche's Search, leading Malebranche to react with disappointment to what he had expected to be a defense of his views.

Desgabets’ published works might lead one to think him a controversialist who had no developed philosophical view of his own. In fact, however, Desgabets wrote several unpublished works that were widely circulated at the time, and these works reveal a distinctive philosophical system. We now have these works in Dom Robert Desgabets: Oeuvres philosophiques inédites, a collection that includes Traité de l'indéfectibilité des créatures and the particularly important Supplément à la philosophie de Monsieur Descartes.

Desgabets’ philosophical system differs from that of Descartes sufficiently for one to dispute whether we should call him a Cartesian (some call him a “radical Cartesian” [Schmaltz 2002]). Desgabets rejects Descartes’ method of doubt on the grounds of a principle of intentionality according to which we cannot think of what does not exist. For the same reason he rejects Descartes’ proofs of the existence of God and the physical world as being unnecessarily obscure and complicated, since the very fact that we can think of God and the physical world suffices to establish their existence. He also rejects Descartes’ attempt to understand the nature of the soul by appealing to a pure intellection that completely divorces the soul from the body on the grounds that all our thoughts depend on the body.