Content area
Full Text
1
NO ONE DISPUTES THAT ROBERT DESGABETS is a Cartesian of some sort and thus that his philosophy has non-empiricist elements. He explicitly describes himself as a follower of Descartes who corrects Descartes's mistakes by using Descartes's own principles, and many of his basic views are recognizably Cartesian.1 But a long tradition, from Cousin and Bouillier to Rodis-Lewis, Easton, and Lennon, regards him as a Cartesian empiricist.2 And indeed, on the face of it, the case for Desgabets's empiricism is overwhelming.3 He says things that sound strikingly like Locke, and he argues against anti-empiricist reasoning in Descartes, Malebranche, and Arnauld, attacking in particular what Descartes and Malebranche have to say about pure intellection. Most importantly, throughout his writings he endorses the empiricist principle that nothing is in the intellect except what was previously in the senses. Defending this principle, Desgabets argues against Descartes's attempt in the Meditations to divorce himself from the senses to arrive at pure intellections, and he argues against Malebranche's and Arnauld's examples of thoughts that are supposed to be completely independent of the senses.
Since Descartes and his followers are generally supposed to be prototypical nonempiricists, if Desgabets is a Cartesian empiricist, then he is a particularly interesting specimen. Indeed, Patricia Easton ends her Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Desgabets by stressing that "[h]is significance lies in his development and defense of a form of empiricism that, despite its anti-rationalist tendencies, has a clear basis in the work of Descartes himself and constitutes a respectable strain of Cartesianism."4 In this paper, however, I challenge the case for taking Desgabets to be an empiricist. Specifically, I challenge the case for taking him to be a concept empiricist, someone who believes that all our ideas or concepts derive from experience.5 In the empiricist-sounding passages in his writings, Desgabets is not espousing concept empiricism; he is espousing a position on the union of the soul and the body. He wants to say, not that all our ideas derive from experience, but that all our ideas are united to motions of our bodies.
2
The strongest evidence for Desgabets's empiricism is his frequent endorsement and defense of the principle Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu ("nothing is in the intellect except...