Throughout his career, Schelling assigns knowledge of the absolute first principle of philosophy to intellectual intuition. Schelling's doctrine of intellectual intuition raises two important questions for interpreters. First, given that his doctrine undergoes several changes before and after his identity philosophy, to what extent can he be said to “hold onto” the same “sense” of it by the 1830s, as he claims? Second, given that his doctrine of intellectual intuition restricts absolute idealism to what he calls a “science of reason”, (...) which he says cannot prove the absolute’s existence, what other doctrine does he require in order to prove this? I will answer these questions by tracing the shifts in Schelling’s doctrine of intellectual intuition from the 1790s to the 1830s and drawing out its evolving methodological role within his science of intelligibility. (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)