Étienne Gilson Quotes

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.

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].

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

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.

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

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.