See also: Tabula shaved

Tabula shaved literally (: clean slate ) is a philosophical concept epistemological according to which the human spirit is born virgin and would print itself by the only experiment. This concept is today challenged in particular by the evolutionary Psychologie and Génétique seeks it. It is thus about an opposite concept to the Original sin in the catholic doctrines.

According to this theory developed in particular by Thomas d' Aquin, John Locke, the individual is born empty from very contained mental and its identity would be given only by the events which arrive to him starting from its birth. The metaphor is strong since the tabula was the shelf on which the schoolboys wrote and returned virgin to make it reusable.

The tabula shaved was also developed by Descartes. For him, it is advisable to make tabula shaved at a certain time when he realized there. It is necessary to give up all the learned things which are false and which are not enough “stable” to set out again on other bases more stable than one would build ourselves. It would thus be advisable to make clean slate ( tabula shaved ), to push all our knowledge on side and to be rebuilt oneself a personal, stable and true knowledge.

The metaphor and the theory which it illustrates were especially taken again with XVIIIe after Locke by the sensualists and the " éducationistes" of which Condorcet. The theory had influence in psychiatry since Pinel thought that the disturbances of the spirit were related to the fact that it had been badly formed and that one was to thus propose a treatment by the spirit.