Gilson on Dogmatism

The article aims at uncovering reasons why philosophy may become conducive to dogmatism which inevitably leads to the failure of philosophy. In the light of Gilson’s considerations contained in his The Unity of Philosophical Experience, the author concludes that philosophy is always exposed to the influence of dogmatism when it is done from a non-philosophical standpoint. For each time when the engagement in the philosophical enterprise is driven by non-philosophical needs, it is usually the case that the goal of philosophy is misconstrued as merely that of providing an instrumental ontology to non-philosophical areas of knowledge. To avoid such mistakes as logicism, theologism or psychologism, philosophy must recover its proper object that is the real world of persons and things, and its proper method that is metaphysics.