Intuition

Overthink

Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Education

4.7 • 549 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2025

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our intuitions are never wrong… right? In episode 124 of Overthink, Ellie and David wonder what intuition actually is. Is it a gut feeling, a rational insight, or just a generalization from past experience? They talk about the role intuition has played in early modern philosophy (in the works of Descartes, Hume, and Mill), in phenomenology (in the philosophies of Husserl and Nishida), and in the philosophy of science (in the writings of Bachelard). They also call into question the use of intuitions in contemporary analytic philosophy while also highlighting analytic critiques of the use of intuition in philosophical discourse. So, the question is: Can we trust our intuitions or not? Are they reliable sources of knowledge, or do they just reveal our implicit biases and cultural stereotypes? Plus, in the bonus, they dive into the limits of intuition. They take a look at John Stuart Mill’s rebellion against intuition, the ableism involved in many analytic intuitions, and Foucault’s concept of historical epistemes.

Works Discussed:

Maria Rosa Antognazza and Marco Segala, “Intuition in the history of philosophy (what’s in it for philosophers today?)”
Gaston Bachelard, Rational Materialism
Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No
Gaston Bachelard, The Rationalist Compromise
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic
Moti Mizrahi, “Your Appeals to Intuition Have No Power Here!”
Nishida Kitaro, Intuition and Reflection in Self-Consciousness

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, and welcome to Overthink.
0:16.6	The podcast where two friends who are also professors help you think about your everyday life,
0:22.9	including your intuitions.
0:25.0	I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson.
0:26.9	And I'm Dr. David Peña Guzman.
0:29.8	So I feel like when people talk about intuition in everyday contexts, they say things like
0:35.6	trust your gut, right?
0:36.8	So intuition is basically synonymous, I would venture to say, with a gut feeling in our
0:41.8	everyday parlance thoughts.
0:44.9	Yeah.
0:45.3	And, you know, sometimes people also call themselves intuitives to mean lightly psychic, as if
0:52.5	somehow your intuition not only gives you a gut feeling, but also a
0:56.0	brain feeling about the future or about other people's mental states.
1:02.4	I have so little patience for this. I was just watching the new season of the Traders,
1:07.7	which is like a reality TV show. And it has to do with guessing. It's like a game,
1:12.6	a guessing game of whether somebody's a traitor or a faithful. Yeah, like mafia. Yeah. And one of the
1:18.0	contestants was like, yeah, you know, I read energies and Nikki is definitely a traitor. Nikki,
1:24.6	not a traitor. The energy she was reading non-existent. That's how I feel
1:29.2	about so-called intuitives. You ready to listen to a TikTok? Always. I need you to hear this because I
1:36.6	needed to hear this. And this is a reminder because I know this is coming on your page and I'm not
1:40.6	going to use any hashtags. I'm just going to post this and hope it finds you. Or maybe it'll get 200 views and it won't matter.
1:46.0	But listen to me.
	...

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