The object of this work is to define Dante's attitude or, if need be, his successive attitudes towards philosophy. It is therefore a question of ascertaining the character, function and place which Dante assigned to this branch of learning among the activities of man. My purpose has not been to single out, classify and list Dante's numerous philosophical ideas, still less to look for their sources or to decide what doctrinal influences determined the evolution of his thought.

The highly regarded French philosopher, Étienne Gilson, brilliantly plumbs the depths of Thomistic Realism, and false Thomisms as well, in this answer to Kantian modernism. The important work, exquisitely translated by Mark Wauck, brings the essential elements of philosophy into view as a cohesive, readily understandable, and erudite structure, and does so rigorously in the best tradition of St. Thomas.Written as the definitive answer to those philosophers who sought to reconcile c...

A classic study of the art of painting and its relationship to realityIn this book, Étienne Gilson puts forward a bold interpretation of the kind of reality depicted in paintings and its relation to the natural order. Drawing on insights from the writings of great painters—from Leonardo, Reynolds, and Constable to Mondrian and Klee—Gilson shows how painting is foreign to the order of language and knowledge. Painting, he argues, seeks to add new beings to nature, no...

In this final edition of his classic study of St. Thomas Aquinas, Etienne Gilson presents the sweeping range and organic unity of Thomistic philosophical thought. The philosophical thinking of Aquinas is the result of reason being challenged to relate to many theological conceptions of the Christian tradition. Gilson carefully reviews how Aquinas grapples with the relation itself of faith and reason and continuing through the existence and nature of God and His creation, the world and its ...

The Tribulations of Sophia was the last of Étienne Gilson's books to appear during his lifetime (1967). French readers would have recognized the title's echo of a nineteenth century children's book by the Countess of Ségur, the Misfortunes of Sophia. Its disobedient protagonist, young Sophia (of whom the American Dennis the Menace was to be a very pale imitation) is the cause of a sequence of minor domestic catastrophes. One wonders if Gilson is proposing that the Catholi...

In this book (a translation of his well-known work L'esprit de la philosophie medievale), Etienne Gilson undertakes the task of defining the spirit of mediaeval philosophy. Gilson asks whether we can form the concept of a Christian philosophy and whether mediaeval philosophy is not its most adequate historical expression. He maintains that the spirit of mediaeval philosophy is the spirit of Christianity penetrating the Greek tradition, working within it, and drawing out of it a ce...

This short book is a work of one of the 20th century's greatest philosophers and historians of philosophy, Étienne Gilson. The book's title, taken from the first chapter, may sound esoteric but it reflects a common-sense outlook on the world, applied in a "methodical" way. That approach, known as realism, consists in emphasizing the fact that what is real precedes our concepts about it. In contrast to realism stands idealism, which refers to the philosophical outlook that begins with ideas...

This book is a collection of nine articles by the twentieth century's leading medievalist, Etienne Gilson. A major participant in the revival of Thomistic philosophy, Gilson was a member of the French Academy and, after a university career culminating at the Sorbonne and the College de France, he turned down an invitation from Harvard University to become the guiding spirit of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto for several decades. Several of the arti...

This History of Philosophy is intended as an introduction to philosophy itself. The approaches to philosophy are many, but if one aims to give the reader, beyond mere factual information, a genuine philosophical formation, the historical approach becomes a necessity. Much more important than knowledge about philosophy is a true notion of what it is to philosophize. And what better way is there to learn to philosophize than to observe the great philosophers of the past? If one has the under...

A medievalist and defender of the notion of Christian philosophy, Etienne Gilson had a lifelong interest in the philosophy of art. He questioned whether what is reproduced as art in contemporary society is art at all. This is not a simple issue. A cheap version of a novel is still a novel. A picture of a statue is not a statue, nor indeed is a photograph of a painting a painting. Recorded music has particular complications. The organizer of an industrial assembly line is neither an artist ...

Those new to Gilson can get a sense of the theme that dominated most of his life's work in the central essay on the historical significance of Thomism. Those familiar with him will perhaps be surprised by the sympathy with which he treats the more traditional theologians who resisted Aquinas and the Latin Averroists alike. Gilson prolongs his seminal demonstration of Scholastic influence on Descartes's philosophy by showing that there is also some unfortunate Scholastic influence in what w...