Pierre-Sylvain Régis

Pierre-Sylvain Régis (1632 to 1707) was a French Cartesian philosopher and a prominent critic of Spinoza. Born near Agen, he attended the lectures of Jacques Rohault in Paris, became a follower of Descartes and taught Cartesian principles in Toulouse, Aigues-Mortes, Montpellier and Paris until a ban on teaching Cartesianism ended his lectures. His main work, the Cours entier de philosophie of 1690, set out the system of Descartes in an orderly way, though he altered it toward empiricism: he denied that the soul has innate and eternal ideas and held that body and extension can be known as directly as soul and thought. He opposed the idealism of Malebranche, answered critics such as Pierre Daniel Huet and Jean Duhamel, and was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1699.