Robert Desgabets was a French Benedictine who offered a form of Cartesianism that departs from René Des-cartes's own account of the nature of substance and of one's knowledge of the self and of the external world. These departures are indicated in the two book-length texts from Desgabets published during his lifetime, but they are explicated most fully in manuscripts published only during the mid-1980s, in a definitive edition of his philosophical writings sponsored by Studia Cartesiana.

Desgabets was born in Ancemont in Verdun, a region annexed by France in 1552, to Jean des Gabets and Barbe Richard. He entered the Benedictine order in 1636 and taught philosophy and theology for over a decade at Saint-Evre in Toul. In 1648 he was named the Benedictine procurer general in Paris, and the following year he took up the position of professor of philosophy at Saint-Arnold in Metz. From...