Étienne Gilson Quotes

Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought.

I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse [knowing], there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse [being].

The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts.

While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being.

Up to Descartes' time, and particularly during the Middle Ages, it had always been agreed that philosophy consisted in a transposition of reality into conceptual terms

If there is a single initial error at the root of all the difficulties philosophy is involved in, it can only be the one Descartes committed when he decreed, a priori, that the method of one of the sciences of reality was valid for the whole of reality.

Having left us with thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body), [Descartes] does not know how to account for the union of soul and body.

What, then, will this philosophy be? Thomas only employed it for the service it renders Christian wisdom. No doubt this is why he never thought of separating it from this wisdom and giving it a name. He probably did not foresee that the day would come when people would go through his works to extract the elements of a philosophy from his theology. He himself never attempted this synthesis.

With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] turns into Cogito ergo res sunt [I think, therefore things are].

As used today, the word realism means in the first place the opposite to idealism when it claims that it is possible to pass from the subject to the object.

The scientific sterility of the Middle Ages has to be condemned for the same reasons which make it necessary today to condemn the philosophic sterility of scientism.

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism.

If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it.

Reality can be grasped at levels of different depths. It is immediately given to us in a kind of block form, which is simply the "apprehended reality".