Intuition and insight. The analysis of their selected features with reference to Bernard Lonergan position

Abstract

The paper discusses notions of intuition and insight. The most typical features attributed to intuition in the history of philosophy – receptiveness, passivity, immediateness, directness, self-evidence, infallibility, and indubitability – are analyzed. A variability of the notion of intuition is shown, taking as its example the category of insight, central for the epistemology of Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1904–1984), the twentieth-century philosopher locating between phenomenology, Thomism and hermeneutics. Insight is still in some respects a kind of intuition although it is creative, active, mediated, indirect, fallible and open to revision.

Keywords

• intuition
• insight
• Bernard J.F. Lonergan
• receptiveness/creativity
• directness/indirectness
• infallibility/fallibility