[Advaita-l] A chapter summary of an important new academic text

[kv chellappa]

Thanks.
Noted in FB also.

On Sat, 7 Jun 2025 at 21:52, Michael Chandra Cohen via Advaita-l <
advaita-l at lists.advaita-vedanta.org> wrote:

> Reviving Intellectual Intuition in Metaphysics: Contemplative Philosophies
> and Being --Abstracts Prof. Kenneth Rose
>
>
> *These abstracts from my latest published book, which I prepared for the
> publisher, provide a summary of its arguments. It is avail*able from
> PBloomsbury at this link.
>
> *Boo*k A*bstract*
> The sight 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.
>
> Chapter Abstracts
> Introduction
> The introduction suggests that before metaphysics can overcome the
> forgetfulness of being it must add contemplative practice to mathematical
> logic and conceptual analysis. Moving beyond popular and philosophical
> views of intuition and Kant’s deflation of classical intellectual intuition
> to recognition of transcendental shaping of sensations, the introduction
> argues for a contemplative metaphysics grounded in the perception through
> contemplatively fortified intellectual intuition of being and its ideal
> forms. Because being, as infinite, is prior to conceptualization, a
> conceptual metaphysics must be supplemented with a contemplative
> metaphysics grounded in the intellectual intuition of being. This
> speculative and dialectic knowing cognizes being as being through the
> interplay of positive (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) movements of
> intellectual intuition. Although alien to many contemporary philosophers,
> this view has had many adherents globally. The ontological wasteland of
> modernity drains our lives of significance, but it can be overcome by
> reviving the intellectual intuition of being as a central method in a
> global contemplative metaphysics.
>
> Chapter 1: The Forgetfulness of Being
> This chapter begins with Heidegger’s claim that European philosophy has
> forgotten being. This charge is evinced in the use of the ancient
> ontological term being (ens, ousia) in deflationary schools of analytic
> metaphysics, which take the word as indicating nothing more than the fact
> that something exists. This chapter evokes in brief historical accounts the
> progressive forgetting of being from Aristotle through Aquinas, Kant, and
> Rorty. Attention then turns to the ontological flatland of contemporary
> life where physicalist accounts of existence have displaced ontologically
> more robust classical ontologies with the result that metaphysical meaning,
> which once was guaranteed by robust ontologies, has evaporated. Analytic
> philosophy’s zombie argument suggests that a physicalist account of
> consciousness is false because a zombie world with actors but no
> consciousness is inconceivable. This foretells the end of ontological
> physicalism and a remembrance of being through intellectual intuition.
>
> Chapter 2: The Scope and History of Intellectual Intuition
> This chapter defines intellectual intuition and traces its theorization in
> Asian and European philosophy. As cognition of the noetic, immaterial
> ground of the physical universe, intellectual intuition grounds
> conceptualization and inference, making it essential to every act of
> knowing and judgment. The role of intellectual intuition in Asian
> philosophy—chokkan in Japanese and pratibhā in Sanskrit—and European
> philosophy—noesis in Greek and intellektuelle Anschauung in German—is
> traced in a series of historical vignettes. Since Kant’s critiques,
> intellectual intuition has been obscured in Western philosophy, and it is
> under assault currently through the influential criticism of Herman
> Cappelen and the negative program in experimental philosophy. Despite these
> challenges, it retain a central place in analytic philosophy and it has
> never disappeared from traditional and Asian philosophies. A revival of
> metaphysics that moves beyond technical competence in conceptual analysis
> and logic to intuitive perception of their grounding being itself will
> require training in contemplative practice alongside those other skills.
>
> Chapter 3: Reviving Intellectual Intuition
> This chapter discusses the content and operation of intellectual intuition.
> At the outset, nous, or intellectual intuition, can be distinguished from
> aisthēsis, or sensation, by considering the general features of presented
> objects, or the universals that underlie them. Universals are also named
> and conceived variously under such terms as are known variously as ideas
> (eidē), forms, and jātis. After suggesting a number of examples of how to
> become aware of intellectual intuition, a description of a series of phases
> in which one becomes progressively more aware of the operation of
> intellectual intuition in cognition follows. These include intellectual
> intuition in conventional experience, formal intellectual intuition,
> meditation and intellectual intuition, and the intellectual intuition of
> being. This discussion turn on the recognition that intellectual intuition
> enacts a process of cognitive generalization that moves consciousness from
> dispersion in particulars through the recognition of general and
> increasingly unified ideas culminating in direct intellectual intuition of
> being in itself.
>
> Chapter 4: Contemplative Metaphysical Practice
> Reviving intellectual intuition as a method in contemplative metaphysics
> necessitates training in meditative practices such as concentration and
> insight alongside logic and conceptual analysis. One venerable method of
> meditation, which blends concentrative and insight practices, Advaita
> Vedānta’s ātma-vicāra, or “self-inquiry.” It prescribes concentrated
> probing of one’s sense of self until it vanishes in a sense of mental and
> spiritual liberation. Another method is the Buddhist uncovering through
> disciplined insight meditation of the unfindability, or nonexistence of a
> self, which is the key Buddhist teaching of anātman, or “nonself.” In these
> practices and in other examples of analytical meditation discussed in this
> chapter, the bond between meditation and metaphysics in discovered through
> concentration-fortified insight practices. The author names this bond “the
> unexcluded middle” because through meditatively fortified intellectual
> intuition, an unformalizable middle ground or middle way between
> contradictory positions emerges in which contradictions are resolved in the
> intellectual intuition of being as fullness, or plenitude.
>
> Chapter 5: The Metaphysics of Intellectual Intuition
> Although metaphysics was rejected as meaningless in the early phases of
> analytic philosophy, it has resurfaced in recent decades as analytic
> metaphysics. This change of fortunes can be traced to influential articles
> by W. V. Quine that established a physicalist basis for a minimal ontology
> and overturned canonical views in analytic philosophy such as the
> analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic metaphysics has tended toward
> actualism and physicalism in keeping with the bias toward nominalism in
> European thought since Ockham. Following the lead of Bertrand Russell, this
> ontological preference for existence is reversed and being as essence is
> given priority over being as existence. This view of being as prior to
> existence overcomes the modal realism of David Lewis in which every
> possibility exists by claiming that what exists is limited by the
> transcendental attributes of being. As the basis of a contemplative
> intellectual intuition, this contemplative metaphysics suggests that
> existence is not wholly contingent nor coextensive with every possibility
> implicit in being. Assisted with this substantive yet ultimately
> nonformalizable metaphysics, the ironism of Rorty can yield to a new age of
> robust, intellectually fortified contemplative metaphysics, which accounts
> for the whole of existence and not merely its physical dimensions.
>
> Conclusion: The Metaphysics of Intellectual Intuition
> The call to recover being as what is as it is mobilizes a renewal of
> intellectual intuition as the necessary condition for a revived and
> effective contemplative metaphysics. The contemplative intellectual
> intuition of being in a contemplative metaphysics restore to philosophy its
> traditional and rightful role in grounding other intellectual disciplines
> including the sciences. It counters scientism by giving contemplative
> intuition priority over mathematics and logic in the quest to know being as
> such. A contemplative metaphysics will thus take its rightful place
> alongside poetry and the other arts and mystical insight as an organ of the
> intuitive perception of being. Contemplative metaphysics is a response to
> the generosity of being, which calls the intellect to participate in its
> fullness. It also peers beyond the unclosed gate of being into being’s
> ownmost openness. This suggest three outcomes of the contemplative
> encounter with being: (1) overcoming skepticism, (2) furthering
> epistemological pluralism, and (3) reverence for being.
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