“Most of our contemporaries think that, at bottom, being a philosopher and adopting an idealist method are one and the same thing.”Étienne Gilson Methodical Realism
“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.”Étienne Gilson Methodical Realism
“The realist method starts with the whole in order to distinguish the parts.”Étienne Gilson Methodical Realism
“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.</i”Étienne Gilson 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”Étienne Gilson being Methodical Realism