Methodical Realism Quotes

“we can only re-establish metaphysics today by returning to realism pure and simple.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists

“What is necessary is that epistemology, instead of being the pre-condition for ontology, should grow in it and with it, being at the same time a means and an object of explanation, helping to uphold, and itself upheld by, ontology, as the parts of any true philosophy mutually will sustain each other.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists

“As long as one makes some kind of conscious state, whether a “passive sensation” or an “apprehended”, come before reality, one will remain more or less in debt to the idealist method. The realist method pursues an exactly opposite course. Every given reality implies the thought which apprehends it. Therefore being is the condition of knowing; knowing is not the condition of being. When this has been established, another step in the direction of metaphysics can be taken.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists

“But if one decides to start with Descartes and finish with Aristotle, and to employ an idealist method while shamelessly making use of a reality one has no right to, one brings confusion into the heart of philosophy and makes its cultivation impossible. To make it possible again is the reason why realists are realists and call themselves such. They too follow a method, but they do not lay down beforehand what that method is to be, as though it were a necessary pre-condition for their philosophy. Instead, they find their method in their philosophy. So they never have to ask themselves whether it is legitimate to transform their method into a metaphysics, because their method is that metaphysics, which is fully aware of its proceedings, of its initial positions, and of their implications.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists

“all idealist philosophies devour their own feet without realizing it.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists

“The Middle Ages were long preoccupied with the nature of the concept, or of the notion which the intellect abstracts from the object; but they never doubted that its content was borrowed from the content of the object, still less that the object really existed.”
― Étienne Gilson, Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists