Desgabets, Robert(1610–1678)
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 1653 to 1657 he served in administrative posts in various Lorraine abbeys. It was during this time that Claude Clerselier attempted to draw him into a defense of Descartes by sending him copies of Descartes's discussion in unpublished correspondence of the Catholic doctrine that the Eucharist involves the "transubstantiation" of bread and wine into Christ's body and blood.
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