Etienne Gilson Quotes
Etienne Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy, the leading figure of twentieth-century neo-Thomism. He devoted his career to recovering medieval philosophy as a serious philosophical interlocutor and not merely as a historical curiosity, producing monographs on Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The quotes below are attributed to Etienne Gilson, organized by topic.
Browse Etienne Gilson by topic
Etienne Gilson on God
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Attributed to Etienne Gilson:
“Faith without reason is fanaticism; reason without faith is rationalism.”
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“Thomas considers that a religious may legitimately aspire to the title and functions of master, but since he could only teach divine things, it is only in relation to the science of divine things that secular sciences can legitimately interest him. This is demanded by the very essence of the contemplative life, the teaching of which is nothing but its immediate extension into the order of the active life.”
Introduction
Etienne Gilson on Knowledge
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“Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”
The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,1937), p. 306 -
Attributed to Etienne Gilson:
“An unmetaphysical age is at one and the same time both incompetent in metaphysics and in need of metaphysics.”
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“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.”
Introduction -
“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.”
Introduction -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“With Descartes the Cogito ergo sum [I think, therefore I am] turns into Cogito ergo res sunt [I think, therefore things are].”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Wikiquote -
“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".”
Wikiquote -
“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.”
Methodical Realism -
“Having expelled quality from the field of extension, [idealists] do not know how to account for it when it reappears in thought.”
Methodical Realism -
“Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being.”
Methodical Realism -
“All realism derives from the analysis of knowledge; all idealism derives from the analysis of a thought.”
Methodical Realism -
“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].”
Methodical Realism
Etienne Gilson on Life
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“We can only choose between two kinds of life , the active and the contemplative .”
Introduction -
“If there is something more in a living being than a pure mechanism, Descartes is bound in advance to miss it.”
Methodical Realism
Etienne Gilson on Mind
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“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.”
Wikiquote -
“Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing.”
Methodical Realism -
“While Descartes finds being in thought, Saint Thomas finds thought in being.”
Methodical Realism
Etienne Gilson on Time
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“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”
Methodical Realism
Etienne Gilson on Truth
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Attributed to Etienne Gilson:
“There are not two truths, scientific and theological. There is but one truth.”
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Attributed to Etienne Gilson:
“The philosophy of being is open and accommodates the entirety of reality.”