Top 15 Étienne Gilson Quotes

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

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

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

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].

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.