This paper considers one of the most controversial aspects of Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy, his notion of intellectual intuition and its place within his philosophy of nature. I argue that Schelling developed his account of intellectual intuition through an encounter with--and ultimate critique of--Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge. Thus, Schelling’s notion of intuition was not an appropriation of Fichte’s conception of intuition as an act of consciousness. Nonetheless, and in spite of his sympathy with Spinoza, (...) Schelling contended that intellectual intuition must be “productive” or “constructive.” I explicate how Schelling justified his use of intellectual intuition in his Naturphilosophie, and detail its relation to his notion of the philosophical “construction” of nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coleridge’s Intellectual Intuition, the Vision of God, and the Walled Garden of “Kubla Khan”Douglas HedleyIn his seminal work of 1917 Das Heilige Rudolph Otto quotes a number of passages as instances of the “Numinose.” Alongside those quotations from more conventional mystics, Plotinus, and Augustine, Otto refers to Coleridge’s “savage place” in Kubla Khan. 1 It is also pertinent that, when trying to define Romanticism, C. S. Lewis (...) appeals to the longing for the “unnameable something” fired by “morning cobwebs in late summer” or the “opening lines of Kubla Khan.” 2 Perhaps it is a mere coincidence that two of the most penetrating and influential scholars of religion in the twentieth century should appeal to Coleridge and his poem “Kubla Khan.” I wish to suggest reasons why the link between the imagery of “Kubla Khan” and a mystical experience of transcendence is not merely fortuitous. Indeed the connection between Coleridge’s mature writing and the imagery of the poem shows that we have good reason for seeing him as consciously writing, both as a poet and as a philosopher, within a visionary mystical tradition. I propose that it is no accident that Coleridge’s most visionary poem draws upon the central Christian image of paradise: the walled garden.This is an attempt not to interpret “Kubla Khan” but rather to suggest Coleridge’s place in the history of ideas as a Christian poet and philosopher. He is best described as an essentially speculative and mystical philosopher-theologian. 3 [End Page 115] By “speculative” I mean a theology inspired by those Church Fathers who emphasize the “vision” of God as an intellectual contemplation (speculari) of the transcendent Absolute, the prius of all being. The scholastics, the medieval German mystics, the Cambridge Platonists, and some of the German Idealists have all been influenced by such a speculative impulse. 4 Hegel uses the term “speculative” for his Dialectic. 5A philosophical or “speculative” approach to theology has invoked hostility from Tertullian onwards. Coleridge’s philosophy of religion often excited the fear of the new pantheistic German theology. John Henry Newman castigated Coleridge’s speculation as more heathen than Christian. Yet the speculative movement in theology spawned both a radical and a conservative wing, and we have to judge Coleridge’s thought in the light of the more conservative branch of nineteenth-century Idealism. D. F. Strauss jettisoned the transcendent “yonder” of traditional theology in favor of his philosophical or “scientific” approach to Christianity. Coleridge, however, could not adhere to theology of immanence; he wished to present a theology of an adamantly transcendent character.The walled garden is an eminently appropriate image of transcendence and was used as such by the fifteenth-century Christian Platonist Nicholas of Cusa, who is one of the links between Patristic theology and German Idealism. I shall draw upon his book The Vision of God as a paradigm of the sort of speculative mysticism which informs Coleridge’s metaphysics and much of his poetry. 6 Reflection upon an exotic poetic image may help us to clarify one of Coleridge’s philosophical tenets; the walled garden can be seen to symbolize that transcendent numinous reality, which the soul inchoately and barely consciously seeks and strives for.Coleridge’s “Mysticism” and the Imagery of “Kubla Khan”Richard Holmes claims that the “Kubla Khan” provides evidence of a transition in Coleridge’s interests and presents this switch from “classical and religious mythology” to the “drama of self-knowledge... the growth of consciousness and civilisation” as a key to Coleridge’s poetry. Holmes writes: [End Page 116][H]is instinct that the modern Epic subject must now centre on “the mind of man,” through “travels, voyages and histories,” shows a shift of poetic focus characteristic of the new Romantic age. The Epic could no longer draw on classical or religious mythology for the framework of its action. It must become contemporary with the world of scientific, anthropological, and psychological exploration: it must centre in some way on the drama of self-knowledge, on the growth of consciousness and civilisation. 7Coleridge would not have seen a conflict between the drama of self-consciousness and classical and religious mythology. In “Kubla... (shrink)

Fichte assigns ‘intellectual intuition’ a new meaning after Kant. But in 1799, his doctrine of intellectual intuition is publicly deemed indefensible by Kant and nihilistic by Jacobi. I propose to defend Fichte’s doctrine against these charges, leaving aside whether it captures what he calls the ‘spirit’ of transcendental idealism. I do so by articulating three problems that motivate Fichte’s redirection of intellectual intuition from being to acting: (1) the regress problem, which states that (...) reflecting on empirical facts of consciousness leads only to further facts and so cannot yield a first principle; (2) the rhapsody problem, which states that the categories form a haphazard set and so lack necessity unless they derive from a first principle; and (3) the nihilism problem, which states that a first principle cannot lie outside our cognition of it, lest it be the cause of our cognition and, being first, the cause of all our actions, reducing us to machines. Crucially, Fichte’s three motivating problems are in fact aspects of a single problem. Leaving any aspect unsolved spoils putative solutions to the other two. Consequently, Fichte requires a single unified solution to all three, which his doctrine of intellectual intuition provides. (shrink)

One of the problems in post-Kantian discussions is the way in which the self procures access to itself. Kant rejects intellectual intuition in human knowledge. Nonetheless, he supposes an access of the self to itself as subject in all conscious knowledge. It is then fitting to ask how this access can occur. Because, if the self is to be taken precisely as subject, in other words as an activity that knows objects, this knowledge of the self should be (...) of a different kind to that in which all the objects already constituted by that activity are known. Fichte or Schelling are usually taken to be the first to have addressed and tried to solve this problem. But Salomon Maimon had already done so in 1789 and had proposed a solution based on intellectual intuition. The aim of this article is to reconstruct Maimon’s arguments, evaluate his proposal, and specifically show that his attempt is the first in which the Kantian problem is addressed and a solution put forward. (shrink)

Schelling scholars face an uphill battle. His confinement to the smallest circles of ‘continental’ thought puts him at the margins of what today counts as philosophy. His eclipse by Fichte and Hegel and inheritance by better-read thinkers like Kierkegaard and Heidegger tend to reduce him to a historical footnote. And the sometimes obscure formulations he uses makes the otherwise difficult writings of fellow post-Kantians seem comparatively more accessible. For those seeking to widen these circles, see through this eclipse and elucidate (...) these formulations, a deeper internal challenge is to make sense of the appearance and disappearance of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s work. The term’s apotheosis is often attributed to the height of German idealism and especially to Schelling’s identity philosophy, outside which he subjects the term to a radical critique. The identity philosophy aims to cognize the absolute ground of the system of knowledge and the system of nature, for which cognition Schelling enlists intellectual intuition. While the identity philosophy falls between a Fichtean debut and a late attack on Hegel, it is difficult to determine its exact parameter. I propose that a necessary condition for doing so is to clarify the explanatory role of intellectual intuition—that is, the specific problem to which it is the intended solution—on which the identity philosophy depends. To this end, I will trace a nexus of problems that Schelling’s use of intellectual intuition is meant to solve. Doing so will not only help to delineate the identity philosophy, but show it to be continuous with Schelling’s earlier and later periods. In §1, I account for the nexus of the problems of grounding, freedom and meaning. These problems demand, respectively, a principle by which cognition forms a system rather than an aggregate, a principle by which a system of cognition is compatible with freedom rather than incompatible and a principle by which a system of freedom can show why there is meaning rather than none. In §2, I reconstruct Schelling’s argument in the identity philosophy for why intellectual intuition can resolve this nexus of problems and, in §3, his arguments during other periods of his thought for why it cannot. I conclude in §4 by suggesting why the identity philosophy is continuous with these periods. Beyond fulfilling the interpretive task of making sense of intellectual intuition in Schelling’s sprawling corpus, my aim is thus to contribute to a unified reading of the latter. (shrink)

Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what (...) he calls a “science of reason”, which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (shrink)

This article examines Mou Zongsan's claim that “if it is true that human beings cannot have intellectual intuition, then the whole of Chinese philosophy must collapse completely, and the thousands years of effort must be in vain. It is just an illusion.” I argue that Mou's commitment to establishing and justifying a “moral metaphysics” was his main motivation for rejecting Kant's denial of the possibility of humans having intellectual intuition. I consider the implications of Mou's response (...) to Kant for the future of Chinese philosophy, for the interpretation of crucial aspects of Kant's own critical thought and for organizing the perspicuous comparison of Chinese and European philosophy. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to characterize epistemic apathy as an intellectual vice. The agent who possesses this character trait is led not to intervene to prevent another epistemic agent from forming a false belief when it would be appropriate to intervene. Following the motivational viewpoint on vice, we conclude that epistemic apathy can be cashed out in terms of imperfect epistemic motivations. The apathetic agent possesses bad (or, at least, lacks good) epistemic motives. We show, however, that (...) motivationalism has difficulties accounting for the excess-vice: epistemic paternalism. Following the obstructivism understanding of intellectual vice, we highlight the fact that epistemic apathy does not get in the way of knowledge for the agent who possesses this trait. This goes against our intuition that epistemic apathy is an intellectual vice. To remedy this, we argue that epistemic vices do not necessarily harm the vicious agent. (shrink)

In Philosophy Without Intuitions Herman Cappelen argues that unlike what is commonly thought, contemporary analytic philosophers do not typically rely on intuitions as evidence. If they do indeed rely on intuitions, that should be evident from their written works, either explicitly in the form of ‘intuition’ talk or by means of other indicators. However, Cappelen argues, while philosophers do engage in ‘intuition’ talk, that is not a good indicator that they rely on intuitions, as ‘intuition’ and its (...) cognates have many meanings that are irrelevant to this particular question. He identifies three other indicators and argues by appeal to case studies that these indicators are not present. I argue here that an account of intuitions as intellectual seemings draws attention to intuition features that Cappelen does not consider. These intuition features appear to be regularly present in the works of contemporary analytic philosophers. (shrink)

The article offers an overview and a critical assessment of the work of Zeev Sternhell, focussing on the questions of fascism and of the anti-Enlightenment tradition. It claims that the career of the Israeli historian revolves around the intuition of a history of European modernity marked by a central opposition: that between the Enlightenment and the anti-Enlightenment. I show how the idea is already present in his initial works, and argue that it produces a specific kind of intellectual (...) history, concerned with the unity of traditions over large temporal horizons. I claim that it has the advantage of offering an historically grounded reading of fascism which nonetheless is capable to account for its emergence in apparently very dissimilar contexts. After having examined some of the shortcomings of this approach, I offer an historical explanation for the type of intellectual history practiced by Sternhell, arguing that it must be tied to his political activism in Israel. (shrink)

George Bealer provides an account of intuitions as “intellectual seemings.” My purpose in this paper is to criticize the phenomenological considerations that Bealer offers in favor of his account. In the first part I review Bealer’s attempt to distinguish intuitions from beliefs, judgments, guesses, and hunches. I examine each of the three phenomenological differences – incorrigibility, implasticity, and scope – that Bealer adduces between intuitions and these other types of mental contents. I argue that any difference between intuitions and (...) these other types of mental contents with regards to their incorrigibility, implasticity, and scope is unproven and likely to remain unproven. In the second part I criticize Bealer’s analogy between intuitions and sensory seemings by suggesting that intuitions do not display the theoretical virtues—consistency, corroboration, and confirmation—that Bealer claims for them. Moreover, I suggest that intuitions do not display the theoretical virtue that would indicate a similarity to sensory seemings, consilience. (shrink)

If we are to understand the complex relationship between Bergson and Kant, we must not approach the former’s philosophy as if it could only be either pre-critical or post-Kantian. Instead, the present essay seeks to shed light on this relationship by treating Kant as another “missing precursor of Bergson.” In Bergson’s eyes, Kant, like Descartes, contains two possible paths for philosophy, which reflect the two fundamental tendencies that are mixed together in the élan vital and continued in humankind: intuition (...) and intelligence. Bergson breaks with Kant from the interior of his philosophy, which he divides into two Kantianisms: the one, which he rejects as ancient, and the other, which he appropriates. What the analysis of this Bergsonian appropriation of Kant reveals, however, is not the existence of a latent Bergsonism in Kant, but rather the recovery of a Kantianism that is completed in Bergson—a Kantianism that embarked down a path that Kant himself, who held himself back from following it in order to dispense with all “intellectual” intuition, had only sketched. Thus, if Bergson is to be believed, an intuitive metaphysics, which installs itself in pure duration, is neither below nor beyond Kantian critique, but can pass through it, can traverse it in its entirety, since it proposes to surpass it, to prolong it following the path that Kant himself had cleared in order to fulfill its suppressed virtualities. (shrink)

In a Socratic spirit of coming to a better understanding of man who finds himself in the midst of a "crisis about knowledge," this dissertation proposes to examine the human subject as a cognitive animal by turning to the long and rich tradition of Aristotelian philosophy, largely ignored today, to focus on and gain inspiration from one of its principal currents of reflection: nous inasmuch as this refers to the human intellectual operation intuiting the substantial level of reality, which (...) can then anchor scientific knowledge of it. ;The examination of nous is based on the text Posterior Analytics II.19, in which Aristotle briefly presents the "habit of nous" as the culmination of a non-rational-discursive process by which the principles of demonstration are acquired. By looking at each of the stages mentioned in the text, there is offered the opportunity to study in detail the different human cognitive capacities and the cognition they provide. This also allows for a comparison and contrast of the capacities and the relationships that can be established between them, which is helpful in understanding man as a cognitive animal, in general, and in determining, in particular, the place and role of intuition in human cognition. ;Starting with Aristotle's views on logic and science, it is established that the rational-discursive operations of the intellect presuppose other non-rational-discursive operations of the intellect, which opens the door to another intellectual operation that can complement the first-mentioned. This other intellectual operation is seen to be closely related to sense cognition and its powers, the means through which the intellect makes contact with external reality. The most important of the different levels of cognition provided by the senses is its highest level, experience; and since human experience involves the activity of the intellect, induction of the principles of science is seen to be an act of the intellect starting from the intelligibility of sense experience. It is concluded, finally, that this act of the intellect is essentially intuitive, consisting mainly in an intellectual grasp of a substance, an insight into its essence. (shrink)

The dissertation entitled Jacques Maritain and the Centrality of Intuition is a study in the influence of Henri Bergson's notion of intuition in the thought of Jacques Maritain. It is argued that Maritain used tenets from Thomistic philosophy to transform Bergsonian intuition, first by putting intuition back into the intellect from which Bergson in fact severed it. It is also argued that, although Bergson in fact put a wedge between intellect and intuition, that was not (...) his intention. Because Bergson in fact separated intuition from the intellect, however, Maritain accused him of being anti-intellectual. Contrary to Maritain's criticism, it is argued that Bergson was anti-intellectual only in the sense of criticizing a bad use of intelligence, but not in the sense of criticizing intelligence as such. Maritain then interprets Bergson's intuition as an immediate knowledge of reality in two ways: first, as the intellectual metaphysical intuition of being yielding a concept of being as being in its analogical amplitude and as not intrinsically linked to matter; second, as various and analogous modes of intuition by way of affective connaturality, i.e., an obscure, but deep and penetrating knowledge of the very subsistence of a thing by bypassing the concept. Various modes of affective connaturality are described, namely, the connatural knowledge of the virtuous person, of the prudent person, of the natural law itself, of the mystic, the lover, and the poet. In connatural knowledge, intuition is seen to be both intellectual and emotion-laden. Given the various modes of intuition explored by Maritain, it is argued that intuition is central to Maritain's thought. It is further argued that the content of one's experience of the self and being known in the various modes of connatural knowledge is stored in the depths of the spiritual preconscious of the soul and acts as an indirect cause that disposes one to have an intuition of being should one be so gifted. In addition, connatural knowledge of being is also an indirect cause of creative insights in science, mathematics, and in all other kinds of knowledge. A kind of poetic intuition is at work everywhere, even when subordinated to the ends of some other kind of knowledge. Consequently, it is necessary to be a contemplative, especially for the philosopher who needs to be attuned and receptive to the mystery of being if he/she is to be gifted with the metaphysical intuition, without which one cannot be an authentic metaphysician of existence. The thought of Henri Bergson, Pierre Rousselot and the Maritain Thomist, Joseph Sikora, S. J. is heavily relied on in the exposition of the thesis. (shrink)

It will be argued that a mode of consciousness which Jean Gebser introduced as 'acategoriality' in the 1950s was anticipated by Holderlin 150 years earlier. According to Gebser, acategoriality is an epistemic act oriented towards a primary experience of being, that is highly integrative and exceeds categorial knowledge. Holderlin shows in his novel 'Hyperion' how the individual subject can realize this experience. He proposes a comprehensive concept of integrative epistemic acts denoted as 'intellectual intuition' whose most differentiated (...) form is acategorial. The accurate de-scription of an acategorial state in 'Hyperion' will be related to an analytical framework formulated within the theory of complex dynamical systems. This framework provides a solution for an analytical problem that Holderlin's conception of acategoriality raises. Conversely, Holderlin's novel offers paradigmatic phenomenological examples for acategorial mental states that are useful for their detailed analytical understanding. (shrink)

Spinoza unequivocally states in the Ethics that intuitive knowledge is more powerful than reason. Nonetheless, it is not clear what exactly this greater power promises in the face of the passions. Does this mean that intuitive knowledge is not liable to akrasia? Ronald Sandler offers what, to my knowledge, is the only explicit answer to this question in recent Spinoza scholarship. According to Sandler, intuitive knowledge, unlike reason, is not susceptible to akrasia. This is because, intuitive knowledge enables the knower (...) to greater power over the passions due to its immediacy, its foundation and because it engenders the boundlessly powerful intellectual love of God. In this paper, I consider to what extent intuitive knowledge is liable to akrasia by exploring whether Sandler's claim can justifiably be attributed to Spinoza. I argue that, given our modal status, it is not plausible to claim that akrasia would never apply to intuitive knowledge. Since intuitive ideas are the ideas of a finite .. (shrink)

There are ways that ethical intuitions might be, and the various possibilities have epistemic ramifications. This paper criticizes some extant accounts of what ethical intuitions are and how they justify, and it offers an alternative account. Roughly, an ethical intuition that p is a kind of seeming state constituted by a consideration whether p, attended by positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p, and so a reason to believe that p. They are distinguished from other kinds of (...) seemings, such as those which are content driven (e.g., the sensory experience that a stick in water seems bent) and those which are competence driven (e.g., the intellectual seeming that XYZ is not water, or that one of DeMorgan’s laws is true). One important conclusion is this: when crafting a positive theory of justification ethical intuitionists have fewer resources than intuitionists in other domains, not because of the subject matter of ethical intuitions, but because of the their structure. A second conclusion is that the seemings featured in substantive ethical intuitions deliver relatively weak justification as compared to other seeming states. (shrink)

This chapter begins with sketching briefly the emergence of intuition in rationalist philosophy. It focuses on the following problems: First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intuition in general, namely immediacy and singularity, and, furthermore, the characteristics of human intuition in particular, namely givenness, passivity and receptivity? Second, what, precisely, is given immediately in intuition? Third, in Immanuel Kant’s distinction between form and content, how can the pure forms of intuition (space and (...) time) be themselves intuitions? The chapter discusses precisely Kant’s intention to overcome Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by introducing a new notion: intuitions as a separate ‘source of knowledge’. Another important feature of Kant’s departure from the Scholastic and rationalist tradition is his rejection of intellectual intuition, of the immediate apprehension of singular objects by intellect without the mediation of sensibility. (shrink)

Panentheism is an often-discussed alternative to Classical theism, and almost any discussion of panentheism starts by way of acknowledging Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781–1832) as the person who coined the term.1 However, apart from this tribute, Krause's own panentheism is almost completely unknown. In what follows, I first present a brief overview of Krause's life and correct some misconceptions of his work before I turn to the core ideas of Krause's own panentheistic system of philosophy. In brief, Krause elaborates a (...) scientific holism that is anchored in intellectual intuition of the Absolute as the one principle of being and recognition. The task of philosophical speculation consequently is twofold: the analytic-ascending part of philosophy proceeds by way of transcendental reflection and according to Krause enables us to obtain intellectual intuition. The synthetic-descending part of philosophy starts by way of showing that science as a whole is an explication of the original union of the Absolute as apprehended in intellectual intuition. Once this is achieved, Krause argues that the emerging philosophy of science is most adequately referred to as “panentheism” since everything is what it is “in and through” the Absolute, while the Absolute itself is not reducible to anything in particular. I end by showing how to relate Krause's panentheism to recent philosophical discussion. (shrink)

In his influential paper “Grasping the Third Realm,” John Bengson raises the question of how we can non-accidentally grasp abstract facts. What distinguishes successful intuition from hallucinatory intuition? Bengson answers his “non-accidental relation question” by arguing for a constitutive relationship: The intuited object is a literal constituent of the respective intuition. Now, the problem my contribution centers around is that Bengson’s answer cannot be the end of the story. This is because, as Bar Luzon and Preston Werner (...) have recently pointed out, this answer leads to the follow-up question of why certain intuitional experiences are constituted by the facts, but others are not. My objective is to answer this question by specifying precisely what is epistemically defective about intellectual hallucinations. My result is that, in stark contrast to perception, intellectual hallucinations are epistemically defective in the sense that something is overlooked. In successful intuition, by contrast, all relevant possibilities/scenarios are considered/imagined. This has crucial epistemological implications. In particular, I argue that intuitions exhibiting a certain phenomenology cannot fail to successfully grasp abstract facts. I call this the non-accidental correctness thesis, which constitutes the main thesis of this paper. (shrink)

Hegel seeks to overturn Kant's conclusion that our knowledge is restricted, or that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in themselves. Understanding this Hegelian ambition requires distinguishing two Kantian characterizations of our epistemic limits: First, we can have knowledge only within the "bounds of experience". Second, we cannot have knowledge of objects that would be accessible only to a divine intellectual intuition, even though the faculty of reason requires us to conceive of such objects. Hegel (...) aims to drive a wedge between these two characterizations, showing that we can have knowledge beyond Kant's bounds of experience, yet without need of divine intuition. And attention to such knowledge is supposed to show that we have no legitimate need to even conceive of divine intuition and its objects - and no need to conclude that our own knowledge is restricted by comparison, or that we cannot know things as they are in themselves. I focus here on the initial case Hegel uses to introduce this extended argument strategy: we can have more knowledge of natural kinds and laws than would be allowed by Kant's bounds of experience. (shrink)

If we adopt a virtue approach to epistemology, what form should the intellectual virtues take? In this paper, I argue that the proper structure of the intellectual virtues should be one that follows the tradition of internalism in epistemology. I begin by giving a general characterization of virtue epistemology and then define internalism within that framework. Arguing for internalism, I first consider the thought experiment of the new evil demon and show how externalist accounts of intellectual virtue, (...) though constructed to accommodate our intuitions in such cases, cannot fully do so. I further argue that only adopting an internalist structure of the virtues will provide intellectual virtues that appropriately mirror the structure of the classical moral virtues. Finally, I argue that only an internalist structure of the virtues can explain why the intellectual virtues are valuable in themselves. (shrink)

I argue that Hegel appeals to the idea of an “intellectual intuition” in his Encyclopedia Psychology and that this appeal has important ramifications for the received view of Hegel’s mature philosophy. Hegel did not, in my view, break with Schelling over intellectual intuition in as decisive a way as has been claimed. Establishing this greater coftgntinuity between Hegel and Schelling will, I hope, bolster a minority opinion in the literature and highlight a critical yet underappreciated aspect (...) of Hegel’s philosophical method. To wit, Hegel was a consummate reviser and, as his dealings with intellectual intuition demonstrate, revamped rather than rejected certain of his predecessors’ doctrines. (shrink)

In a first step I show that given a philosophically<br>warranted concept of God, arguments for<br>the existence of God are either questionbegging<br>or merely stipulative. In a second step<br>I argue that non-stipulative knowledge of God<br>and His existence is intelligible if and only if<br>there is an intellectual intuition of God. I<br>further argue that to obtain this intuition,<br>spiritual training may be necessary. Consistently<br>in this latter case, spirituality becomes a<br>conditio sine qua non in order to assess the truth<br>of theism.

Recent continental philosophy often seeks to retrieve Neoplatonic transcendence, or the Good, while ignoring the place of intellect in classical and medieval Neoplatonism. Instead, it attempts to articulate an encounter with radical transcendence in the immediacy of temporality, individuality, and affectivity.On the assumption that there is no intellectual intuition (Kant), intellectual consciousness is reduced to ratiocination and is taken to be “poor in intuition” (Marion). In this context, the present paper expounds Plotinus’ phenomenology of intellectual (...) experience to show how intellect, for Plotinus, is rather the richest mode of intuition, coinciding with the intelligible content of reality. This content, however, cannot be ultimate, but is the manifestation and apprehension of the transcendent Good as the condition of intelligibility. The Good, therefore, can be encountered only through the ascent to intellectual apprehension, and the visionof the Good is a transcendent moment within the intellectual apprehension of being, not a repudiation of or alternative to it. (shrink)

Plato's depiction of the world soul's cognitive activity in Timaeus 37 A 2‐C 5 offers a general account of intellectual cognition. He gives this account by describing the activity of an ideal cognitive agent, involving the very same comparative mechanism that governs human intellectual activity, namely, the active production of a propositional grasp of sameness and difference that things have in relation to each other in several respects. Plato depicts the world soul's intellectual activity as entirely devoid (...) of immediate forms of cognition such as perception and/or intellectual intuition: everything the world soul cognizes is the outcome of its active comparison of things with each other. In particular, there is no direct cognitive grasp of the being of things. The paper ends with a suggestion as to how to understand Plato's account of the world soul's activity as an instance of the ‘like is known by like’ principle of cognition. (shrink)

The study deals with the matter of three of the most puzzling doctrines of Baruch Spinoza’s system, the so-called ‘final doctrines’, which are intuitive knowledge, intellectual love of God, and the eternity of the (human) mind. Contrary to many commentators, but also in concordance with many others, this account strives to affirm the utmost importance of these doctrines to Spinoza’s system as a whole, but mostly to his ethical theory. Focusing specifically on the cultivation of the human mind, the (...) paper offers partial analyses of the central notions of these doctrines and their conceptual contexts. It is argued that the cultivation of the human mind, i.e., its determination to its perfect activity, should be considered as Spinoza’s ultimate ethical goal, and that the mind truly only advances to this goal by means of these cognitive, affective, and intellectual transformations of thinking. (shrink)

According to the quasi-perceptualist account of philosophical intuitions, they are intellectual appearances that are psychologically and epistemically analogous to perceptual appearances. Moral intuitions share the key characteristics of other intuitions, but can also have a distinctive phenomenology and motivational role. This paper develops the Humean claim that the shared and distinctive features of substantive moral intuitions are best explained by their being constituted by moral emotions. This is supported by an independently plausible non-Humean, quasi-perceptualist theory of emotion, according (...) to which the phenomenal feel of emotions is crucial for their intentional content. (shrink)

Friedrich Hölderlin argued that consciousness requires division and unity. Consciousness emerges through the fundamental distancing of the subject from its surroundings, without which the subject-object distinction would collapse and both objectivity and consciousness would be lost. Nevertheless, insofar as conscious knowledge is unitary, division demands a ground for unity. Hölderlin calls this ground ‘Being [Seyn].’ However, once Being is affirmed, the question of how it is accessed arises. Hölderlin’s scholars disagreed on this issue. This disagreement gave rise to (...) two camps: those who deny that Hölderlin accepts the idea of direct access to Being and believe that he proves Being through an act of reflection (Henrich); and those who argue that for Hölderlin, ‘Being’ is directly accessed. Those who hold the latter position can be further divided into those who conceive of this direct access as knowledge (Frank) and those who argue that this access does not have a cognoscitive character, but rather an aesthetic one (Waibel). This article considers these positions and shows that the direct apprehension of ‘Being’ is part of Hölderlin’s argument aimed at solving a fundamental problem; an argument that differs both from the postulate of access to Being as knowledge of transcendence and from the affirmation of a purely aesthetic mode of access. (shrink)

In this study, first of all, it was important to analyze this technique of returning to the ancient tradition of two outstanding thinkers of the 20th century. M. Heidegger and Sri Aurobindo Ghosh in order to understand to what extent the language of the ancient sages and rishis is still accessible to our understanding; Has it not already happened that the voice of the ancient sages will turn out to be completely foreign to us, like the language of the unconscious, (...) which we do not hear and do not understand? The conducted analysis showed that a certain intellectual conflict arose between Heidegger and the ancient Greeks. This conflict connected with the fact that the German thinker, repeatedly turning to different periods of Greek philosophy and different Greek thinkers and trying to apply to them the phenomenological method of his teacher Husserl, being atheistically minded, never managed to capture the original spiritual intuition of the pre-Socratics in the understanding of being. And at the same time, he himself could not find a suitable name for understanding being in modern culture. Where Heidegger still very carefully writes about the “open clearing” as a manifestation of the truth in the original ancient Greek thinkers, the essence of which, from the point of view of the German thinker, was still given to Heraclitus and Parmenides only intuitively (they did not yet understand the reason for this phenomenon of our consciousness), Sri Aurobindo directly indicates the existence of a connection between the ancient rishis and the existence (revelation) of the gods. Moreover, the processes described by the Indian thinker are very similar to those described by Heidegger. Everything indicates that the thinking of the ancient Greeks and ancient Hindus was very similar. The ancient Greeks (pre-Socratics) tried to understand why our consciousness is given to existence at all, and discovered the existence of inner peace in man – human openness to understanding the existence. Vedic sages, listening to the “voice” of the subconscious, discovered the waves of the subconscious and realized that man is like gods. It is important to note the difference between the pre-Socratics and the ancient Indian rishis in their interpretation of knowledge of existence. For the Greeks, true knowledge of being awakens human existence for knowledge (the logos, the world of naming, the world of concepts). According to the ideas of the ancient Indian rishis, when the gods awakened by man descend into their own world of existence, the consciousness of man in his actual existence also awakens. That is why the truth for the Greeks, according to Heidegger, is the opening and concealment of the truth of being (things), and the truth for the Rishi, according to Sri Aurobindo, is the ascent to true existence together with the gods that awaken in us. (shrink)

Guillaume Fréchette | : Il est généralement admis dans la littérature analytique sur l’intuition que celle-ci est principalement, ou même fondamentalement, une attitude propositionnelle. Partant de là, elle est aussi souvent caractérisée comme une croyance que P, comme la formation d’une croyance sans inférence que P, comme une impression que P, comme une impression intellectuelle que P, comme l’attitude consistant à être poussé, mu par P. Dans tous les cas, la spécificité de l’intuition reposerait au moins en partie (...) sur les propriétés doxastiques qui la distingue d’autres attitudes propositionnelles, comme savoir que P ou douter que P.Cette caractérisation de l’intuition semble à première vue incommensurable avec le concept d’intuition discuté dans la tradition phénoménologique, où l’intuition est caractérisée comme ce type d’expérience qui rend les objets présents, et peut certes être caractérisée en termes d’attitude propositionnelle, mais ne l’est pas essentiellement.Dans ce qui suit, je soulève quelques problèmes auxquels fait face la conception de l’intuition comme attitude propositionnelle. Partant de là, j’aimerais suggérer qu’en amendant cette idée, on peut développer une théorie de l’intuition qui peut employer de manière fructueuse les ressources de la phénoménologie et de la philosophie analytique. Cette suggestion montre que l’incommensurabilité des conceptions analytiques et phénoménologiques de l’intuition est superficielle, plus superficielle que ne le laissent entendre ses défenseurs respectifs. | : It is generally acknowledged in the analytic literature on intuitions that these are generally, or even fundamentally, propositional attitudes. For this reason, intuitions are often characterized as beliefs that P, as seeming that P, as the intellectual seeming that P, or as the attitude of being pushed by P. In all cases, the specificity of intuitions would consist at least in part in the doxastic properties that distinguishes them from other propositional attitudes, such as knowing that P or doubting that P.At first glance, this characterization of intuitions seems incommensurable with the concept of intuition discussed in the phenomenological tradition, where intuition is characterized as the type of experience that make objects present to us. While intuitions in this sense may be characterized as propositional attitudes, it doesn’t imply that they fundamentally are propositional.In the following paper, I raise some problems which faces the conception of intuitions as propositional attitudes. I would suggest that amending this idea allows to develop a theory of intuition which can use fruitfully both the resources of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. As a consequence, the alleged incommensurability of analytical and phenomenological conceptions of intuitions appears to be more superficial than it is usually taken to be defenders of intuitions as propositional attitudes. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that Gilbert Keith Chesterton possessed the genuine intuition of being as defined by the French Thomist, Jacques Maritain, albeit almost without the proper metaphysical habitus. It opens with some explanations of the terms used, and with a short extrapolation of the theory of the intuition of being. Next it proceeds to proving the thesis assumed by the means of demonstrating that Chesterton exhibited the intuition of being (...) as to three most important elements: its proper object, the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of finality. Next it attempts to demonstrate that despite that understanding, he never spoke in a properly metaphysical manner, the fact that points to the lack of metaphysical habitus, and to establish certain consequences of this state of things. The text ends with a list of practical conclusions that could be drawn from an analysis such as this. (shrink)

It is common in bioethical discussion to present thought experiments or cases in order to construct an argument. Some thought experiments are quite illuminating, and ethical theorizing will often appeal at some point to one’s intuitions. But there are cases in which thought experiments are useless or do not contribute to the argument. This article considers cases presented in the context of stem cell research that are destructive of human embryos. I argue that certain popular cases that are meant to (...) motivate the view that such research is permissible either are dialectically useless or do not contribute to the argument. By dialectically useless, I mean that the cases analyzed here yield intuitions in people who are already committed to the permissibility of such research. I end with some reflections that challenge the reliability of our intuitions on applied ethics issues by suggesting that thought experiments in this field are dubious from the start. My argument should not be read to support moral skepticism but to urge that our inquiries on applied issues requires certain intellectual virtues. (shrink)

In “Being Judgement Possibility,” Hölderlin posits that the division between subject and object produced in conscious knowledge requires admitting a being as the ground of that knowledge’s unity. Commentators argue over the way to access such being according to Hölderlin. For Dieter Henrich, being is a presupposition recognized reflexively. Manfred Frank, by contrast, maintains that Hölderlin grants direct access to it in an “intellectual intuition.” This article addresses the respective interpretations of both authors. It (...) shows that Frank’s interpretation is closer to the textual evidence than Henrich’s interpretation. Frank’s interpretation also allows one to explain better the way in which the division between subject and object avoids leading to dispersal. Finally, this article considers the insufficiency of Frank’s interpretation so as to clarify an issue that he himself advances in the course of his argument: how the I manages to distinguish itself in the sphere of intuitable objects. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists hold that intuitions are, or reduce to, beliefs. The argument from intuition without beliefs threatens to undercut any such doxastic account: since there are clear cases of intuition without belief, intuitions cannot be beliefs. Advocates of the intellectual seeming account conclude that intuitions belong to the basic mental kind of intellectual seeming. I argue that rightly understood, apparent cases of intuition without belief are cases of someone having the inclination to believe (...) that p whilst believing that not-p. These can be accommodated by a disjunctive doxastic account holding that to have an intuition is to either have a belief, or to have an inclination to believe. I conclude that intuitions reduce to beliefs, and that there is no need to acknowledge intellectual seemings as basic states in our mental taxonomy. (shrink)

The author of the article framed the question of the possible relevance of the treatment of the Schelling's philosophy in the context of a phenomenological one. Thereby, he points its problematic character, referencing Husserl's treatment of German idealism after Kant (including the thought of Schelling) as the romantic idealism. At the same time, he also states the influence of Schelling on the few phenomenologists who made their careers after Husserl. The article's author reviews the concept of the «being outside-itself» (...) or «ecstasy» in Schelling and Heidegger (as one of the phenomenologists) for the further concretization of the theme. The ecstasy in Schelling is the new name for the idealistic intellectual intuition, by which a singular subject loses its own position as subject and thereby gets to the position of the absolute subject. The absolute subject is one which cannot be an object already. Schelling identifies the ecstasy understood in this way with the wondering as philosophical initiation in Ancient Greece. Such ecstasy leads to unknowing knowledge in Schelling's words. The concept of being outside-itself means the structural element of being of human Dasein, i.e. of temporality in Heidegger. This philosopher thinks that a human being is always already outside itself ontologically, before any intuition both sensual and intellectual. The human subject is not closed in on itself, for then it has to transcend from its immanence to the outside. It is always outside itself, it is ecstatic. In its ecstasies, it is always in the world, instead of being inside the world and other people. Heidegger bases his critique of the traditional metaphysics of the subject on such understanding of the ontological structure of Dasein, i.e. of the true «subject». In conclusion, the article's author states that the approaches to the problem of being outside-itself of both mentioned philosophers are in principle, quite different. Schelling tries to rehabilitate the subjectivity by the reduction of the singular subject to the absolute one. On the contrary, the finitude of human Dasein is the necessary condition of its being in Heidegger. The ecstasy is interiorization in Schelling, but it is exteriorization, which has been always already realized, in Heidegger. However, the author of the article also pinpoints a certain isomorphism of the treatments of ecstasy in both thinkers. In the different ways they attempt to overcome the crisis of the understanding of the subject as closed in itself, create the conditions of this isomorphism. (shrink)

The publication presents Maritain's concept of intellectual intuition in a wide philosophical and historical context and examines its role in the construction of metaphysics. The book addresses metaphysics in the aspect of its development and methodology.

In the 1956-1957 course titled “The Concept of Nature”, Merleau-Ponty takes up Schelling’s thought. In reading Merleau-Ponty’s text on Schelling’s philosophy, we arrive at a point of contact between the philosophy of natural productivity and the philosophy of intellectual or artistic intuition. Merleau-Ponty seems to discover the Schellingian idea of the absolute as an abyss against the Cartesian idea of God as creator. The Merleau-Pontian interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and art from his course gives us one (...) of the keys to his unfinished ontology, which is that nature and art, physis and logos, are tied up in the perception of the dimension of being given in painting or poetry, as the analysis of painting in Eye and Mind will show us an organon of the ontology of the savage being. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the reasons why structured graphics have been largely ignored in the representation and reasoning components of contemporary theories of axiomatic systems. In particular, it demonstrates that for the case of modern logic and geometry, there are systematic forces in the intellectual history of these disciplines which have driven the adoption of sentential representational styles over diagrammatic ones. These forces include: the changing views of the role of intuition in the procedures and formalisms of formal proof; (...) the historical contrast between the universalist subject matter of logic and the specific subject matter of geometry; and the ways in which both logic and geometry were affected by the changes that swept through mathematics during the nineteenth century. This dissertation traces the effects of each of these influences in the evolution of logic and geometry from antiquity to the early twentieth-century work of David Hilbert. For each discipline, it examines the historical factors impacting the creation and development of important diagrammatic systems, the reasons for the adoption or abandonment of these systems, and the philosophical context and debates surrounding the use of these systems. It concludes by arguing that the history of diagrammatic representations in logic and geometry cannot be adequately understood without essential reference to their philosophical background. (shrink)

Intuition is sometimes derided as an abstruse or esoteric phenomenon akin to crystal-ball gazing. Such derision appears to be fuelled primarily by the suggestion, evidently endorsed by traditional rationalists such as Plato and Descartes, that intuition is a kind of direct, immediate apprehension akin to perception. This paper suggests that although the perceptual analogy has often been dismissed as encouraging a theoretically useless metaphor, a quasi-perceptualist view of intuition may enable rationalists to begin to meet the challenge (...) of supplying a theoretically satisfying treatment of their favoured epistemic source. It is argued, first, that intuitions and perceptual experiences are at a certain level of abstraction the same type of mental state, presentations, which are distinct from beliefs, hunches, inclinations, attractions, and seemings. The notion of a presentation is given a positive explication, which identifies its characteristic features, accounts for several of its substantive psychological roles, and systematically locates it in a threefold division among types of contentful states. Subsequently, it is argued that presentations, intuitive no less than sensory, are by their nature poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justification without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as ‘given’. (shrink)

Traditionally the modern theory of ideas has been discussed primarily in reference to its alleged introduction of a veil of mental items between the mind and the world, which leads, through the empiricists, to radical skepticism about the existence of an external world. Here I propose to emphasize an entirely different aspect of the Cartesian theory of ideas which, in my view, is more fundamental in opening the empiricist path that leads to Hume’s radical skepticism. I argue that what I (...) call the “phenomenological presentation” model of ultimate justification is rooted in a fundamental ambiguity between sensible and intellectual apprehension insinuated by Descartes’s view of “clear and distinct” ideas together with his emphasis on the priority of intuition over logical inference. Sensible apprehension relies on immediate acquaintance with items pheno-menologically and ostensively present before the mind as given particulars. The phenomenological presentation model takes its clues from sensible apprehension, although the items present before the mind might themselves be either ideas of the understanding, images of the imagination, sensory impressions, or material external objects. Intellectual apprehension, by contrast, as I illustrate with Leibniz’s model of our knowledge of concepts and truths of reason, consists in the discursive, non-ostensive grasping of the generality of abstract concepts and of formal structures . For Leibniz, all intellectual apprehension is unambiguously “logical discursive apprehension” as opposed to “direct ostensive apprehension.” Thus, Leibniz unmistakably disambiguates Descartes’s model in favor of a precise intellectual model. The empiricists, by contrast, correspondingly disambiguate Descartes’s conception in favor of an entirely sensible model.Tradicionalmente, a teoria moderna das idéias foi discutida principalmente em conexão com a sua suposta introdução de um véu de itens mentais entre a mente e o mundo que leva, por meio dos empiristas, ao ceticismo radical sobre a existência de um mundo externo. Aqui eu proponho enfatizar um aspecto completamente diferente da teoria Cartesiana das idéias que, na minha visão, é mais fundamental no que diz respeito a abrir o caminho empirista que conduz ao ceticismo radical de Hume. Eu argumento que o que eu chamo de o modelo de “apresentação fenomenológica” de justificação última está baseado em uma ambigüidade fundamental entre apreensão sensível e intelectual insinuada pela visão de Descartes de idéias “claras e distintas” junto com a sua ênfase na prioridade da intuição sobre inferência lógica. A apreensão sensível confia no contato imediato com itens presentes fenomenologicamente e ostensivamente perante a mente como particulares dados. O modelo de apresentação fenomenológica está inspirado na apreensão sensível, embora os itens que se apresentam perante a mente poderiam ser eles mesmos idéias do entendimento, figuras da imaginação, impressões sensórias, ou objetos externos materiais. A apreensão intelectual, por contraste, como eu ilustro com o modelo de Leibniz de nosso conhecimento de conceitos e verdades da razão, consiste na compreensão discursiva e não-ostensiva da generalidade de conceitos abstratos e de estruturas formais . Para Leibniz, toda a apreensão intelectual é claramente “apreensão discursiva lógica” por oposição a “apreensão ostensiva direta”. Assim, Leibniz claramente desfaz a ambigüidade do modelo de Descartes em favor de um modelo intelectual preciso. Os empiristas, por contraste, desfazem a ambigüidade da concepção de Descartes em favor de um modelo completamente sensível. (shrink)

The Cartesian thesis that some justifications are infallible faces a gradation puzzle. On the one hand, infallible justification tolerates absolutely no possibility for error. On the other hand, infallible justifications can vary in evidential force: e.g. two persons can both be infallible regarding their pains while the one with stronger pain is nevertheless more justified. However, if a type of justification is gradable in strength, why can it always be absolute? This paper explores the potential of this gradation challenge by (...) rejecting Fumerton's recent ‘semantic decision' solution. On Fumerton's suggestion, the putative gradation of infallible justifications is essentially semantic. It concerns only how we use the relevant term but not how well we perceive the truth. Regardless of its intuitive appeal, Fumerton's solution does not cover all the related situations. There is an irreducibly epistemic sense in which infallible justifications vary in degrees. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Kant's puzzling claim that the B-Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason should be considered as having two main steps. Previous commentators have tended to agree in general on the first step as arguing for the necessity of the categories for possible experience, but disagree on what the second step is and whether Kant even needs a second step. I argue that the two parts of the B-Deduction correspond to the two aspects of (...) a priori cognition: necessity and universality. The bulk of the paper consists of support for the second step, the universality of the categories. I show that Kant's arguments in the second half of the B-Deduction aim to define the scope of that universality for possible experience by considering the possibilities of divine intellectual intuition, of non-human kinds of sensible intuition, and of apperception of the self. In these ways Kant delimits the boundaries of the applicability of the categories and excludes any other possible experience for human beings. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how ‘sensible intuition’ becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an ‘intellectual intuition’ for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic (...) achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems interpreted to be resolvable only via an appeal to ‘intellectual intuition’. Part three begins with Kant's subsequent return to the question of freedom and nature in his Critique of Judgment. With Goethe's contemporaneous Metamorphoses of Plants as a contrast case, it becomes clear that whereas Goethe can embrace the role of an intuitive understanding in his account of nature and within the logic of polarity in particular, Kant could never allow an intuition of nature that in his system would spell the very impossibility of freedom itself. (shrink)

An epistemologist tells you that knowledge is more than justified true belief. You trust them and thus come to believe this on the basis of their testimony. Did you thereby come to know that this view is correct? Intuitively, there is something intellectually wrong with forming philosophical beliefs on the basis of testimony, and yet it's hard to see why philosophy should be significantly epistemically different from other areas of inquiry in a way that would fully prohibit belief by testimony. (...) This, I argue, is the puzzle of philosophical testimony. In this paper, I explore the puzzle of philosophical testimony and its ramifications. In particular, I examine the case for pessimism about philosophical testimony—the thesis that philosophical belief on the basis of testimony is impossible or is in some way illegitimate—and I argue that it lacks adequate support. I then consider whether the source of the apparent intellectual wrongness of testimonial‐based philosophical belief is grounded in non‐epistemic norms and goals of philosophical practice itself and argue that such norms are implausible, don't conflict with testimonial‐based philosophical belief, or else are mere disciplinary norms, lacking substantial normative force that would make it wrong to form testimonial‐based philosophical belief. (shrink)