Intuition — Direct, immediate knowledge attained without the mediation of inference, discursive reasoning, or concept. The term derives from the Latin intueri (“to look at,” “to contemplate”), suggesting an apprehension by a kind of inner vision, in contrast to discursive knowledge, which advances by steps and demonstrations. Medieval scholasticism already distinguished cognitio intuitiva, directed at the present and existing object, from cognitio abstractiva, which operates through general concepts. In Kant, intuition (Anschauung) is the way in which an object is given to us: sensible intuition, structured by the pure forms of space and time, provides the raw material that the understanding then organizes by means of concepts — hence the formula that thoughts without content are empty and intuitions without concepts are blind. For Bergson, philosophical intuition is a form of sympathy through which thought enters into the interior of the object and grasps real duration (durée), the qualitative flow of consciousness inaccessible to the analytical intellect, which can only decompose and measure. In Husserl’s phenomenology, in turn, eidetic intuition apprehends universal essences from the imaginative variation of particular exemplars, going beyond mere sensory perception. A classic example is the immediate evidence that two points determine a single straight line, grasped without demonstration. Intuition thus stands opposed to deduction and mediate reasoning, and is closely related to notions such as evidence and immediate apprehension, lying at the center of debates among rationalism, empiricism, and phenomenology over the foundations of knowledge.
← Glossary