Intuitive and abstractive cognition

Abstract

Scotus and Ockham as the focal points of the discussion The fourteenth century is especially rich in controversies about knowledge, but our understanding of them, while improving, is still limited. The relevant texts are not widely available, and as a result the analysis that has been produced is isolated and sketchy. Consequently, while we can frame tempting hypotheses about developments in the period and their influence on subsequent thought, it is still the familiar landmarks that best serve to present the themes of the time and the orientations of recent commentary. Especially notable among those landmarks are the theories of intuitive cognition in Duns Scotus and William Ockham. Nearly all the medieval discussions of intuition that follow them are an attack on or defence of one or the other. Consequently, a presentation of the notion of intuition that focuses around Scotus and Ockham will provide a useful picture of the terrain on which subsequent battles have been fought. The problem of the cognition of individuals Around 1250 – the position of William of Auvergne suggests things may not have been so neat in the immediately preceding period – writers of both Aristotelian and Augustinian persuasions could maintain as a matter of course that the province of the human intellect is the immaterial, so that with respect to the physical world our cognitive experience of existent individuals comes through sensation while the intellect contributes only the universal. Orthodox belief, of course, required that God's knowledge extend, as his providence does, to individuals.

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