Etienne Gilson Quotes on Knowledge
Étienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (1932), The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1937), and the late Being and Some Philosophers (1949) gave twentieth-century neo-Thomist philosophy its most influential historical-philosophical retrieval of the medieval scholastic tradition. The central project is the demonstration that the Thomistic synthesis is not the abstract Aristotelianism the modern history of philosophy had treated it as, but a distinctive Christian philosophy whose recognition of the existential primacy of the act of being (esse) over the essential structure of the being (essentia) supplies the genuine philosophical advance of the medieval over the ancient tradition. The framework, developed across Gilson’s long Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies career at Toronto, shaped the twentieth-century Catholic philosophical revival through Maritain, the Toronto school of medieval studies, and the broader recovery of medieval philosophy as a serious philosophical interlocutor.
Quotes
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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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Attributed to Etienne Gilson:
“Faith without reason is fanaticism; reason without faith is rationalism.”
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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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“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