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Régis, Pierre-Sylvain (1632–1707)

from ENTRIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

Jasper Reid
Affiliation:
King's College London
Lawrence Nolan
Affiliation:
California State University, Long Beach
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Summary

Régis (or Regis) was a prominent but controversial Cartesian at the turn of the eighteenth century. He presented his own opinions in two substantial works, System of Philosophy (1690, although completed a decade earlier and initially refused a license) and The Use of Reason and Faith (1704). Appended to the latter was a refutation of the first fifteen propositions of Spinoza's Ethics; and Régis also entered into polemical exchanges with Pierre-Daniel Huet, Jean Duhamel, and Nicolas Malebranche. His work covers several fields, including physics (where he owes much to Jacques Rohault, under whom he studied), ethics, logic, and revealed religion, but his most idiosyncratic views are on metaphysics. Here, he owes much to Robert Desgabets: but, since many of Desgabets’ own works remained unpublished at the time, it was Régis who tended to serve as the public face of their shared opinions.

Like Desgabets, Régis acknowledges that he is pushing some points further than Descartes himself had done, but he maintains that these were the conclusions that Descartes should have embraced, had he been true to his own principles. Régis identifies a substance with its own essence and existence, and he maintains that all of these things, as well as the eternal truths that characterize such immutable essences, are freely created together by God (although he prefers to call these things “perpetual”/“eviternal” and “indefectible,” reserving the terms “eternal” and “immutable” for God alone). He holds that there is no need to appeal to the fact that God is not a deceiver to establish the existence of material substance: the mere fact that we can think of it is sufficient to establish that it exists, for otherwise there would be no content to our idea. But Régis sharply distinguishes between body as such and individual bodies. The former is a perpetual and indefectible substance, but the latter are temporal and corruptible “modal beings,” defined by the fact that their extensions are modified by certain particular shapes and motions. The possibility of all of these modifications, and thereby of all individual bodies, is created by God with the substance itself and is known by him through his creative will rather than seen in his own perfections as Malebranche maintains.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Régis, Pierre-Sylvain. 1704 (1996). L'usage de la raison et de la foi. Paris.Google Scholar
Régis, Pierre-Sylvain. 1691. Cours entier de philosophie, 3 vols. Amsterdam: Huguetan (retitled edition of Régis 1690).Google Scholar
Régis, Pierre-Sylvain. 1690. Système de philosophie, 3 vols. Paris: Thierry.Google Scholar
Schmaltz, Tad M. 2002. Radical Cartesianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, Richard A. 1998. The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics.Indianapolis: Hackett.Google Scholar

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