Étienne Gilson Quotes
1884–1978 France
Étienne Gilson (13 June 1884–19 September 1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy.
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Random Étienne Gilson quote
21 quotes
Philosophy always buries its undertakers.
We can only choose between two kinds of life, the active and the contemplative.
If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it.
Hume's skepticism, therefore, descends in a direct line from Cartesian mathematicism.
The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts.
Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought.
Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing.
Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being.
All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought.
With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] turns into Cogito ergo res sunt [I think, therefore things are].
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.
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.
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.
Teaching, as well as preaching, to which it is allied, is certainly a work belonging to the active life, but it derives in a way from the very fullness of contemplation
While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being.
The function of the teacher, as we have just defined it, is naturally directed toward a twofold object, interior and exterior, depending upon whether it is applied to the truth the teacher meditates upon and contemplates within himself or to the listeners whom he is teaching.
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 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.
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].