Étienne Gilson Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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".