Abstract

My dissertation explores the role the idea of intellectual intuition played in the development of German idealism from Kant to Hegel. I locate German idealism within the epistemological framework established by Kant, and emphasize the extent to which both the philosophical problems the idealists address and the solutions they propose must be seen within the general context of Kant's philosophy. The notion of intellectual intuition presents a particular challenge for such a Kantian interpretive context, however. Kant argues that human knowledge requires two elements--a spontaneous conceptual faculty which gives form to experience, and a receptive faculty, through which the content of experience is received from some external source. Although Kant insisted that the spontaneous and receptive faculties were distinct in humans, he introduced the notion of a hypothetical mode of cognition in which the forms of thought would generate their own content, rather than receive it from elsewhere. Kant called this cognition an "intellectual intuition," and strictly denied that it could ever be an object of possible human knowledge. ;The resurrection of the idea of intellectual intuition in German idealism, therefore, raises some puzzling issues. The idealists locate their philosophies within the framework of the Kantian system; yet they affirm the existence of a concept which must, according to Kant, remain beyond the bounds of human knowledge. Throughout this dissertation, I defend the claim that the idealists' use of intellectual intuition is justifiable, within the context of Kant's epistemology. They do not violate Kantian principles, because they never claim that intellectual intuition is a feature of conscious, human experience. Rather, they conceive of intellectual intuition as the basis of such experience, functioning as its transcendental ground. Moreover, by virtue of this distinctive pairing of intellectual intuition and transcendental ground, by theorizing that an intellectual intuition provides the condition for the possibility of experience, the idealists can address a number of problems which remained unresolved in Kant's system. My dissertation consists of a series of studies, in which I critically examine the role of intellectual intuition in the systems of Fichte, Schelling, and the early and late Hegel