Desgabets, Robert (1610–78)

Although he is now little known, Desgabets was an important seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, scientist and mathematician. An early defender of Cartesian philosophy, his physical explication of transubstantiation created such an uproar that he complied with a public order and renounced his views. He defended the essential union and interaction of soul and body, and the free creation of the eternal truths. The latter view led him to an empiricist epistemology: all ideas have a sensory basis and are essentially related to existing objects. Despite his originality, he is best known for his polemic with Foucher.