Existential Thomism

• God
• Creation
• Providence
• Salvation

Etienne Gilson's Case for Realism

featuring: Dr. Tadie's Blackboard

Etienne Gilson (1884-1978)

Bullet points from the Oxford Companion to Philosophy

and the Macmillian Encyclopedia of Philosophy

• Le réalisme méthodique, first published in 1935

• Defense of common-sense realism

• Critique of Maritain's Critical Realism and the effort to introduce elements of idealism into realist philosophy.

• French historian of Medieval Philosphy, existentialist Thomist

• Originally specialized on Descartes

• Believed that Christian philosophy contains unique philosophical ideas that the Greeks did not know about. For example: God

Metaphysics (First Philosophy)

Neo-Scholasticism

Scholasticism

Scholastic Philosophy: A Science of first principle and first cause

"A Realism which, determined to undo Idealism, didn't realize that it itself only exists through and thanks to its adversary"

Methodical Realism, page 20

"What is first given us is the existence of things" (Methodical Realism, pp 55)

Intuition-of-being

Existentialist Thomism

Essentialist

Transcendental

Ethics (Second Philosophy)

"We ought to get our knowledge of simple things from composite things and arrive at what is prior by way of what is posterior."

(On Being and Essence, pp29)

Joseph Owens' Defense of Esse

Essence

Already given up on BEING

Essence + Existence

The "human" inside our head is existence-neutral

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973)

Idealist/ Rationalist

Immanuel Kant

(1724-1804)

Physics- The REAL

Epistemology (Third Philosophy)

From Critique of Pure Reason

to Critique of Practical Reason

Bias

Still meditating on a FIRST PHILOSOPHY

REFERENCES

• Aquinas, T. On Being and Essence. Translated by Armand Mauer. Toronto, Ontario: The Pontifical Institue of Mediaeval Studies, 1968.
• Gerson, L. (n.d.). "Gilson, Etienne (1884- 1978)." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.
• Gilson, E. Methodical Realism: A Handbook for Beginning Realists. Translated by Philip Trower. San Francisco, CA : Ignatius Press, 2011. Print.
• Hudson, D. Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Macon, GA : Mercer University Press, c1987. Print.
• Knasas, J. Being and Some Twentieth Century Thomists. New York: Fordham University, 2003. Print.
• Miller, R. (1967). "Gilson, Etienne Henry (1884-1978)." Updated by Christian B. Miller in 2005. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Macmillan) ed. 2 (Vol. 4, pp. 91-93). Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2006. Print.

"Ontology precedes Ethics"

- Cardinal Dolan

First Idealist

(Realist by Intention)

Rene Descartes (1596-1600)

Math- The IDEAL

Hegel the Realist

The manner of study in ancient times is distinct from that of the modern world, in that the former consisted in the cultivation and perfecting of the natural mind. Testing life carefully at all points, philosophizing about everything it came across, the former created an experience permeated through and through by universals. In modern times, however, an individual finds the abstract form ready made. In straining to grasp it and make it his own, he rather strives to bring forward the inner meaning alone, without any process of mediation; the production of the universal is abridged, instead of the universal arising out of the manifold detail of concrete existence.

(Phenomenology of Spirit, "Preface," Paragraph 33)

GWF Hegel (1770-1831)

Kant reversed

the ladder

Anthropology

Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

From Cogito ergo sum

to Cogito ergo res sunt