Étienne Gilson Quotes

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.

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

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

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

What is most apparent and constant in Thomas' personality, the image he most likely had of himself, is the teacher. The saint was essentially a Doctor of the Church; the man was a teacher of theology and philosophy; the mystic never entirely separated his meditations from his teaching, which drew its inspiration from them.

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

Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being.

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.

Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing.

We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.

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

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

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.

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".

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.