673 research outputs found
Gilson as Christian Humanist
No full textThe author suggests that the intellectual life of Étienne Gilson constituted a new humanism, that Gilson’s scholarly work was part of a new renaissance, that a new humanism that Gilson thought is demanded by the precarious civilizational crisis of the modern West after World Wars I and II. He also argues that, more than anything else, Gilson was a renaissance humanist scholar who consciously worked in the tradition of renaissance humanists before him, but did so to expand our understanding of the notion of “renaissance” scholarship and to create his own brand of Christian humanism to deal with problems distinctive to his age. The author shows the specificity of the Christian humanism that Gilson developed as part of his distinctive style of doing historical research and of philosophizing
The Importance of Gilson
No full textThe author aims at answering why preserving, reading, and understanding the work of Étienne Gilson is crucial for the Western civilization if one wishes to be able to understand precisely the problems that are besetting the West and how one can best resolve them. He claims that among all the leading intellectuals of the past or present generation, no one has better diagnosed the philosophical ills of Western culture and better understood the remedy for those ills than has Étienne Gilson
WHY GILSON? WHY NOW?
No full textThe author identifies and discusses the most important elements of Étienne Gilson’s thought which emanate out of his articulation and defense of the Western Creed. To the question: why Gilson, why now?, the author offers a following answer: because we need to champion the Western Creed, defend philosophical realism, rightly interpret the history of philosophy, correctly comprehend Christian philosophy, and show that modernist and postmodernist systems are arbitrary. The author maintains that Gilson delivers us with the realist philosophy of the human person, shows us the undeniable advantages of philosophical realism, and formulates an original notion of Christian philosophy which appreciates that genuine philosophy is non-systematic in its nature, and that it can expose the failure of modernist philosophies that strive to be systems
Gilson, Darwin, and Intelligent Design
No full textThe article starts with stating the fact that today there is an increasing recognition of difficulties with Darwinism accompanied by vigorous responses on the part of Darwin’s defenders; among the instances of challenge to the dominant theory, one can find a book of Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, and those behind the Intelligent Design movement. Inrelating the book of Gilson to the ID proponents, the author concludes that, while in some ways they are on the same side in opposing the anti-creation thrust of Darwinism, Gilson is neutral on the validity or truth of Darwin’s biological hypothesis. Gilson, however, whose book preceded the ID movement by some twenty years, seeks to analyze Darwinism from the perspective of the classical philosophy of nature. He well understands that, according to modern scientific method, final causes are excluded from consideration, but he calls for a biophilosophy which will be open to the reality of human experience as Aristotle was and recognize that teleology is present in nature. According to him, even if teleology seems to be a contestable explanation, chance as understood by Darwinists is the pure absence of explanation
Étienne Gilson, Duns Scotus, and Actual Existence: Weighing the Charge of ‘Essentialism’
No full textÉtienne Gilson juxtaposes what he calls Aquinas’s “existentialism” to what he calls Scotus’s “essentialism.” For Gilson, “existentialism” is philosophical truth, the only view compatible with an authentically Christian metaphysic, while “essentialism” is a Hellenic mistake that seduces Christian philosophers by appealing to the idolatrous desire to reduce reality to what is intelligible. In this paper, the author attempts to describe the difference between “essentialism” and “existentialism” as understood by Gilson. Then, he assesses the case for attributing “essentialism” to Scotus, based on an assessment of Scotus texts and secondary scholarship
Gilson and Rémi Brague on Medieval Arabic Philosophy
No full textGiven contemporary interest in Islam, compelled by the astounding violence perpetrated in its name, the author considers what two historians of philosophy, Étienne Gilson and Rémi Brague, writing a generation apart, have to say about medieval Arabic philosophy and the relevance of its study to our own day
Primo Cadit in Intellectu Ens: Gilson, Maritain, and Aquinas on Knowing Being
No full textThe author compares the views of Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Thomas Aquinas on the order in our knowledge of being. While Gilson and Maritain maintain that esse and the actus essendi are what are first known, Aquinas maintains consistently that it is the existent thing or the ens itself that is first known. The paper proceeds by first laying out the positions of Gilson and Maritain as evidenced in their respective works Being and Some Philosophers and Existence and the Existent. Then, it manifests what in their positions is correct and in what they err. And finally, it argues that ens is the first thing known by appealing to the proper object of the intellect, the order between the acts of the intellect, and the intellect’s mode of procedure. In the course of these arguments, the primary authoritative sources used are the works of Aquinas
Gilson, Krapiec and Christian Philosophy Today
No full textThe author undertakes an attempt to answer the following question: is Christian philosophy possible today? The question seems to be of great importance due to the fact that what Christians who try to do philosophy usually encounter is bitter criticism which comes to them from two sides at once: that of academy and that of the Church. In short, for academy their philosophy is too Christian, and for the Church it is too academic. Being indebted to the insights of Étienne Gilson and Mieczyslaw A. Krapiec (the original Polish spelling: Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, pronounced: myechisuaf albert krompyetz), the author comes to the conclusion thatChristian philosophy is possible today only if: 1) it isnot identified with the art of persuasion, as its final end lies in gaining understanding rather than being convincing, 2) itis the work of a Christian, and 3) it has thereal world as its object and metaphysics as its method. ForChristian philosophy—which in essence consists indoing philosophy by Christians in order to get morerational understanding of their religious faith—shouldbe identified with theperfection of the intellect achieved by practicingthe classical philosophy of being
Gilson, Krapiec and Christian Philosophy Today
No full textThe author undertakes an attempt to answer the following question: is Christian philosophy possible today? The question seems to be of great importance due to the fact that what Christians who try to do philosophy usually encounter is bitter criticism which comes to them from two sides at once: that of academy and that of the Church. In short, for academy their philosophy is too Christian, and for the Church it is too academic. Being indebted to the insights of Étienne Gilson and Mieczyslaw A. Krapiec (the original Polish spelling: Mieczysław Albert Krąpiec, pronounced: myechisuaf albert krompyetz), the author comes to the conclusion that Christian philosophy is possible today only if: 1) it is not identified with the art of persuasion, as its final end lies in gaining understanding rather than being convincing, 2) it is the work of a Christian, and 3) it has the real world as its object and metaphysics as its method. For Christian philosophy—which in essence consists in doing philosophy by Christians in order to get more rational understanding of their religious faith—should be identified with the perfection of the intellect achieved by practicing the classical philosophy of being.Paweł Tarasiewic
MacIntyre’s Gilsonian Preference
No full textAlasdair MacIntyre arrived relatively ‘late’ to Thomism in his philosophical career. One of the many determining influences on his thought has been the Thomist Étienne Gilson. This article examines MacIntyre’s possible motives for embracing Gilson as someone apparently allowing him to identify as an “intellectually fulfilled” Thomist. The author claims that MacIntyre’s arrival to Thomism was a well considered one, an achievement unto itself
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