Kat Rose

The insight that everything arises through the generosity of being is a metaphysical claim and an intellectual intuition. It is not merely the conclusion of a thought-experiment or of an exercise in conceptual analysis but of the intellectual intuition of being. This long-neglected faculty of philosophical insight is an immediate, intuitive discerning of being as it parcels itself out into the ideal intellectual forms (eidē, ta katholou, jāti) providing the underlying nonphysical arrangement of the physical and mental worlds. Its neglect in Western philosophies over the last millennium has led to a forgetfulness of being, with a corresponding loss of meaning and ontological grounding of contemporary globalizing culture. Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies and Being seeks, long after its banning by Kant, to revive the use of intellectual intuition in metaphysics as essential to the development of an ontology that depends not only on conceptual analysis and logic but also on intellectual intuition, which is cultivated through contemplative practice. The cultivation of what is named pratibhā in Sanskrit, theōria in Greek, contemplatio in Latin, and intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) in more recent European philosophy is the primary method and probe that I will apply in the following considerations. In contrast to the procedure in most contemporary metaphysical treatises, the intellectual intuition of being precedes arguments for metaphysical claims about being in this book. Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics, as a work of contemplative metaphysics drawing upon historical sources across multiple Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions, has the potential to ameliorate divisions between science, philosophy, and religion and between diverse cultures and divergent worldviews.