Intuition

Intuition (Anschauung) See also categorical intuition, eidetic intuition, giveess, principle of principles The German term Anschauung is formed for the German word meaning 'to see', 'to watch', 'to look at' (schauen) just as the Latin intuitus is related to the verb, intuire, to see. Kant distinguished sharply between two separate faculties - sensibility (Silichkeit) and understanding (Verstand). These two faculties provide two distinct 'sources of knowledge' for Kant. Kant introduces the term 'intuition' in place of the more usual 'sensation' (.Empfindung) because he wants to be able to say that space and time are apprehended in intuitions and not through sensations. For Kant, intuitions have both matter and form. The matter is 'the raw stuff of sensory impressions' and the form is space and time. According to Kant, the combination of the sensory impressions into a manifold caot be the work of the sensory impressions themselves but must come from the form of intuition Kant claims to have shown that human beings have only sensible intuition and he denied that human beings had the capacity for intellectual intuition For Kant, the introduction of the distinction between intuitions and concepts was a way of separating himself from the Leibnizian-Cartesian heritage according to which sensations were considered to be 'confused thoughts'. Descartes included sensation and imagination in his list of mental, thinking activities in the Second Meditation. For Descartes, sensing (sentire) is a 'special mode of thinking'. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl offers a complete reworking of Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts. Husserl begins with the notion of sensuous intuition as an immediate grasping of the object as in direct perception but he expands the notion of intuition to include non-sensuous categorial intuitions According to Husserl, cognitions are to be related back to 'primal sources' (Urquellen) in 'giving intuitions' (Ideas I § 1; 111/1 7). Immediate seeing consists not only of sensuous seeing but is to be understood as original, giving intuition of whatever kind appropriate to the level of cognition involved (Ideas I § 19). Husserl

The Husserl Dictionary
Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen
Continuum Philosophy Dictionaries