On Being And God

"At issue here is not the possibility if God's attaining Being, but, quite the opposite, the possibility of Being's attaining to God." 

- Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte

On Metaphysics, Objects, And Phenomenology

The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to to attain the absolute.

- Henri Bergeson, La Pensée et le mouvant

On Science And Nominalism

Maritain, an Aristotelian-Thomist roasts the failure of modern science and nominalism

‎The error of pseudo-scientific mechanism clearly supposes the error of nominalism. If the universal doesn't directly or indirectly designate an essence but only a collection of individual cases, its not at all possible to understand how scientific law can be necessarily the succession of singular events contingent.

- Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

On Being, Theology, Metaphysics And The Failure Of Platonism

The fact that Neoplatonism makes bad theology and worse [biblical] exegesis is no philosophical argument against the Platonic notion of being. Yet, it goes a long way to prove something else, which is the only point I am now trying to make. If any being ever entailed the notion of existence, it is Yahweh, the God whose very name is, I AM; and here is a Christian theologian [Marius Victorinus] who, because he still conceives being after the manner of Plato, cannot even understand the very name of his God. A tangible proof indeed that the Platonic notion of being is not only foreign to existence, but inconsistent with it.

- Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd Ed., (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952).

On Ens Causa Deus

quid enim est, nisi quia tu es? ergo dixisti et facta sunt atque in uerbo tuo fecisti ea.

- S. Aureli Augustini, Confessiones XI, 5.

On The Necessity Of Metaphysics

In other words, it is quite possible that actual existence may be an active force and an efficient cause of observable effects in those things of which we say that they are. If such were the case, all philosophies based upon an existenceless notion of being would be courting disaster, and eventually meet it. It would not take more than two or three disastrous experiments of that kind to convince philosophers that it does not pay to posit being as the first principle of metaphysical knowledge. Hence their repeated attempts to replace it by any one of its many possible surrogates, at the risk of multiplying philosophical failures, so to speak, ad infinitum.

- Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers. 2nd Ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952.