Abstract

When Etienne Gilson died in 1978 at the age of 94 he was regarded as one of the twentieth century's most distinguished historians of medieval philosophy. It was his scholarship and his reputation as a great teacher that attracted hundreds of students to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies which he founded in 1929 as part of St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto. A Gilson school emerged as students of the Institute carried his thought to many parts of the globe. Gilson's intellectual biography is well known. A student of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, he found that he could only understand Descartes against the backdrop of medieval philosophy. Once enmeshed in medieval scholarship he found it hard to leave. He produced major studies of Augustine, Bonaventure, Scotus, Aquinas, and Dante. Though he remained always a historian of medieval philosophy, Gilson was eventually to adopt the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, making it the basis of his own. Being and Some Philosophers established Gilson as a metaphysician in his own right. It was said by a student that Gilson would do research on anything at the drop of a hat. Some of his most charming work was the seemingly philosophically irrelevant studies he made and published under titles such as Choir of Muses, Heloise and Abelard and Dante et Béatrice. The Gifford Lectures given at the University of Aberdeen in 1932 and published as The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy and the William James Lectures given at Harvard University in 1936-37 and published as The Unity of Philosophical Experience remain, perhaps, Gilson's best known and most frequently translated works. His Painting and Reality, the 1955 A. W. Mellon Lectures of the National Gallery of Art, is still a widely used volume.