Maria Rosa Antognazza's work has issued a historical challenge to the thesis that the analysis of knowledge (as justified true belief) attacked by epistemologists from Gettier onwards was indeed the standard view traditionally upheld from Plato onwards. This challenge led to an ongoing reappraisal of the historical significance of intuitive knowledge, in which the knower is intimately connected to what is known. Such traditional accounts of intuition, and their accompanying claims to epistemological primacy, constituted the precise target of Moritz Schlick's (...) critique. Schlick engages with this topic throughout his oeuvre, from some of his early epistemological writings, to his anti-metaphysical stance as a leading Logical Empiricist. Schlick crucially distinguishes knowledge from mere acquaintance, denying that the latter has epistemic status. He therefore argues that the very notion of ‘intuitive knowledge’ is a contradictio in adjecto. (shrink)

Among the most peculiar traits of Kant’s critical philosophy is the contention that, while we can know our moral maxims and can thus reflect on our actions from a moral point of view, we cannot really know whether in a given situation our actions are actually motivated by those maxims. This means that, although we have a firm sense of our moral duties, we can never be certain whether some particular action of ours is done from duty or simply in (...) accordance with it. This view is voiced in several of Kant’s writings. Most prominent is its appearance in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, but we also find it in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and in The Metaphysics of Morals, and it is even present in smaller writings such as “On a Miscarriage of all Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” or “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but is of no use in practice”. It is against this background that I revisit Kant’s remarks on the lack of self-knowledge regarding the motives of our proper actions. I suggest a reading of Kant’s views on this issue in the light of a tradition reaching back to Plato, in which man’s self-relation is shaped in an irreducible way by both self-consciousness and self-ignorance. (shrink)

The paper analyses Schelling and Schopenhauer’s conflicting views on intuition within the context of German classical philosophy and provides an interpretation of their differences. Moreover, the paper intends to fill a gap in the literature, by explaining how Schopenhauer grounded intuition in aesthetics and ethics on feelings and mysticism. After the Introduction, Section 2 summarizes Kant’s epistemology and its role in the subsequent discussions on intuition, and Sections 3 and 4 focus on Schelling’s intellectual intuition and Schopenhauer’s account of different (...) kinds of intuition. Sections 5 and 6 analyse how Schopenhauer argued that feelings and mysticism explain metaphysical insights in aesthetics and ethics. Section 7 sums up the main contributions of this paper through a comparative overview of Schelling and Schopenhauer’s respective accounts of intuition. (shrink)

-/- In the prime years of Hegel’s philosophical career, Prussia made progressive reforms to childhood education. Hegel had long supported reform. In his early Stuttgart Gymnasium Valedictory Address (1788), he had advocated for a public interest in widespread public education as a means for developing the children’s potential. Like Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hegel believed in education’s power to promote individual development (Bildung) as a path of freedom, which is achieved largely by expanding the student’s linguistic capacity since language, as Humboldt (...) understands it, is “the formative organ of thought [das bildende Organ des Gedanken]”. By combining Humboldt’s insights on language (especially his discussion of the power of Sanskrit) with themes in Hegel’s Science of Logic, I will demonstrate that the mind’s power to make judgments is a forward movement that can be arrested by epistemic injustice. Humboldt’s reflections on linguistic flowering and the factors that might impede it can help us understand epistemic injustice as an interference in linguistic cognitive mediation. -/- . (shrink)