ABSTRACT
Symbol and intuition: the two basic notions that mark the focus of the present volume are loaded with a variety of conceptual implications that have accrued to them from the long history of their use in philosophical language. In the scholastic tradition the corresponding Latin term intuitus as well as the adjective 'intuitive' qualify both sensible and intellectual cognition. Besides its opposition to discursive cognition, intuitive cognition, due to a distinction successfully introduced by Duns Scotus in the fourteenth century, enters into antithesis to what is called 'abstractive cognition'. The distinction of cognitio intuitiva and cognitio abstractiva, a subject of many medieval debates, has received various interpretations. Of pivotal importance for the conceptual history of the two notions of intuition and symbol in the philosophy of enlightenment are Leibniz's 1684 Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis, where he delineates a dichotomically structured hierarchy of modes of cognition.
