Étienne Gilson Quotes

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

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

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

Indeed, all idealism derives from Descartes, or from Kant, or from both together, and whatever other distinguishing features a system may have, it is idealist to the extent that, either in itself, or as far as we are concerned, it makes knowing the condition of being.

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

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].

All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought.

The mathematician always proceeds from thought to being or things. Consequently, critical idealism was born the day Descartes decided that the mathematical method must henceforth be the method for metaphysics.

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.

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

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

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".

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.

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.