The notion of intuition in Husserl

Abstract

ple, Ockham foregoes Scotus' causal theory of But the ideas of direct knowledge is retained by him, as is the broad meaning of the term. to Ockham, an intuitive cognition of a thing is that in virtue of which one can have evident knowledge of whether or not a thing exists, or more broadly, of whether or not a contingent proposition about the present is true. {Op. cit., p. 502.) What is con spicuous by its absence is any reference to an internal or introspective source of knowledge. In this regard, Ockham is being followed by the editors of OED who try to characterize intuitive knowledge by con trasting it to discursive knowledge. According to the letter of such authorities, direct perceptual knowledge is to be counted as intuitive knowledge, since it obviously is not discursive. I doubt that this is really in a good agreement with current ordinary usage. One partial reason why the old meaning not only has persisted in ordinary language but has been canonized by lexicographers is that it does not prejudge the philosophical issues associated with the notion of intuition. One can arrive at an insight in a nondiscursive way only to discover that one has unconsciously performed a series of perfectly normal inferences. When Sherlock Holmes intuitively perceives that