Methodical Realism By Etienne Gilson: Book Review

This book, Methodical Realism written by Etienne Gilson is a collection of essays written between the years 1931-1935. It is considered one of Gilson’s cornerstones in realism. Gilson (1884-1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. He primarily dealt with medieval philosophy and studied the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and also drew upon the work of Rene Descartes. Though Gilson studied the Thomistic tradition at length, he did not see himself as a neo-scholastic. This is more than evident in this book, where Gilson talks about methodical realism, which emphasizes the primacy of reality over conceptual. This position is in direct contrast with the idealist position which held that reality as we know it is a mental construction.
The main argument of the book is based on the Gilson’s comparison of Thomistic metaphysics and epistemology with the idealist positions of Descartes and Kant. This book is divided into five chapters dealing with different aspects of the nature of realism and its method. Gilson begins the book by stating, “Knowledge is not a mere conceptual analysis it is the external reality that makes possible the intellectual act.”
The first

In other words, both the cases evoke the inner experience to affirm the reality of the object using the principle of causality – the foremost principle of knowledge. Gilson states to accord immediatism to Descartes would be ridiculous because, “his whole method consists in deducing the existence of an extension, genuinely distinct from thought, from a thought genuinely distinct from extension.” (Gilson 1990, 50) He then asks how can what said by Mercier be true when it is not so in the case of Descartes, seeing as how Mercier draws from Descartes albeit