Étienne Gilson Quotes

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].

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.

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

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

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

Philosophy always buries its undertakers.

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

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

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".

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

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.

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.

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

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