Abstract

The paper discusses notions of intuition and insight. The most typical features attributed to intuition in the history of philosophy – receptiveness, passivity, immediateness, directness, self-evidence, infallibility, and indubitability – are analyzed. A variability of the notion of intuition is shown, taking as its example the category of insight, central for the epistemology of Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1904–1984), the twentieth-century philosopher locating between phenomenology, Thomism and hermeneutics. Insight is still in some respects a kind of intuition although it is creative, active, mediated, indirect, fallible and open to revision.