The global path of capitalist development is continuously transformed as a result of the production and integration of advanced information and communication technologies within various forms of production. The first half of this paper conceptualises ICTs as capital’s appropriation and objectification of the productive forces of the general intellect in ‘the general artificial intellect’, a category that refers to the total processing power of networked ICTs in global society. The second half of the paper analyses Uber’s development (...) of the elements of capital’s artificial intellect as the cybernetic means of real subsumption in its immaterial production process. The paper concludes that Uber’s development of autonomous vehicles is an example of the global trend in transport automation that could raise the organic composition of capital of the transport industry, which I suggest would advance the stage of real subsumption toward a third and final stage of autonomous subsumption. (shrink)

As part of the Historical Materialism research stream on immaterial labour, cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, begun in issue 15.1, this articles explores the importance of the expression 'general intellect', proposed by Marx in the Grundrisse, for an analysis of linguistic and intellectual work in contemporary capitalism. It links the notion of general intellect to the crisis of the law of value, the political significance of mass intellectuality, and the definition of democracy in a world where (...) knowledge is a productive force in its own right. (shrink)

The notion of physical premotion (praemotio physica) is usually associated with the theological topic of divine concurrence (concursus divinus). In the present paper I argue that the Thomist Domingo Báñez (1528–1604) applied the concept of premotion (though not the expression “praemotio”) also in his psychology. According to Báñez, the active intellect (intellectus agens) communicates a kind of “actual motion” to the phantasma (i.e. the mental sensory image perceived by the imagination) in order to render it a collaborator of intellectual (...) cognition. Such an actual motion is, in other words, a premotion to the effect, as the phantasma is, in Báñez’s view, “elevated” to the production of an effect that transcends its proper powers. This Báñez’s theory was largely accepted in the subsequent development of Thomism. (shrink)

This article examines Averroes’ interpretation, found in his Long Commentary on the De Anima, of a famous passage in Aristotle’s De An. III 5 which presents the intellect “producing all things, as a kind of positive state, like light”. Averroes, clearly heir to Alexander of Aphrodisias for whom hexis refers not to the intellect “agent” itself but to its product, defends nevertheless, via the comparison with light, the conception of the agent intellect as an hexis, which leads (...) us to the inevitable consequence that the agent intellect is the prime object of the material intellect, acting as a condition for all subsequent thoughts. (shrink)

The following is an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views; whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in (...) Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the universal as content but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of the universal nature. This is because for Aquinas the universal nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to study the relations between habit and the operation of intellection in Aquinas. I will start with a presentation of the acquisition of intellection and the constitution of intellectual habit. I will then turn to the problem of the reactivation of the “stored” intelligible species, which constitutes the intellectual habit. This reactivation, for Aquinas, is not yet the act of intellection. Indeed, an additional step is required in order for intellection to be achieved, namely (...) an “operation.” I will explain why this additional step is needed. In his later works, following Augustine, Aquinas holds that the operation of the intellect, besides the use of the species, entails the production of another means of cognition: the “word.” I will argue in favour of the view that the later Aquinas does not abandon the first type of intellectual operation, based only on the species, but maintains both operations in parallel, and that his reason for maintaining these two different operations is that the species and the word provide different kinds of cognition. I will then tackle the complicated question as to how this difference of cognition is to be accounted for at the habitual level. (shrink)

Aquinas puts forward two different, and conflicting, interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect. In his earlier interpretation of Themistius, Aquinas understands him to hold the position that both the possible and agent intellect are separate and incorruptible, existing apart from individual human souls but shared in by individual souls in the process of knowing. In De unitate intellectus contra averroistas, however, Aquinas radically departs from this reading, hailing Themistius as a genuine interpreter of the Peripatetic position, while (...) decrying Averroes’s perversion of both Themistius and Aristotle. This paper examines these competing interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect in his Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, focusing on two issues central to its interpretation: the nature of intellect insofar as it is separate, impassive, and unmixed, and whether the productive intellect is one or many. (shrink)

Aquinas puts forward two different, and conflicting, interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect. In his earlier interpretation of Themistius, Aquinas understands him to hold the position that both the possible and agent intellect are separate and incorruptible, existing apart from individual human souls but shared in by individual souls in the process of knowing. In De unitate intellectus contra averroistas, however, Aquinas radically departs from this reading, hailing Themistius as a genuine interpreter of the Peripatetic position, while (...) decrying Averroes’s perversion of both Themistius and Aristotle. This paper examines these competing interpretations of Themistius’s account of the intellect in his Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, focusing on two issues central to its interpretation: (1) the nature of intellect insofar as it is separate, impassive, and unmixed, and (2) whether the productive intellect is one or many. (shrink)

This paper concerns Hegel's early treatment of the productive imagination in his 1803–1804 Faith and Knowledge. I show how he articulates that activity in terms of a pair of speculative unities, which solve lingering problems of self-knowledge and self-constitution from Kant's B-deduction. On the one hand, I argue that the familiar unity of spontaneity and receptivity makes possible knowledge of the moment of self-positing. On the other hand, I contend that Hegel's talk of imagination as both an “organic idea” (...) and an “intuitive intellect” refers to a self-constituting capacity that intellects like ours possess. I show that self-constitution is possible, for Hegel, only in so far as intellects like ours possess a capacity to unify possibility and actuality in thought, or to think themselves into being. (shrink)

In Plotinus’s universe, Intellect is the first “product” of the One. Yet why and how precisely is Intellect “produced”? What characteristics distinguish it, and its particular way of knowing, from its higher cause? Questions such as these will lead one deep into the metaphysics and epistemology of the Enneads, where the operative principles that underlie particular passages often need to be teased out carefully. Indispensable requirements for this task are attention to philological and historical detail, and a general (...) sensitivity to the problems Plotinus is facing. Emilsson combines both admirably.In the introduction, Emilsson sets out his baseline approach: Plotinus’s Intellect can be understood in terms of an “ideal knower,” i.e., “something that knows and understands what there may be to know and understand in as full a sense as one could possibly postulate” . As will become clear from chapters 3 and 4, it is self-knowledge in particular that lies at the heart of Plotinus’s view of the conditions that an ideal knower must fulfill. (shrink)

Poe’s influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” a Library of Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry’s death.2 Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature—irresponsible in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”; “all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed” . How, then, we ask, did (...) he hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems—thirty years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the Marginalia. Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he had learned English for one sole reason: “to read Poe better.”3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot is content to remark that the French poets “were not disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware” . He underlines, however, that Poe showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète maudit, Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in whom he discovered “a method and an occupation—that of observing himself write” . So Poe had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox: “with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet,” he writes, “the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold convictions” .Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be thought the product of monstrous error. And yet “from Poet to Valéry” and the complementary studies in English or French of the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles, not only because Poe was “ce poète incomparable, ce philosophe non refute” 4 and, therefore, worthy of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they found a figure of radical independence—classicist, visionary, logician supreme—whom they explained by convergent tropes of daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of Poe’s action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive rewriting by which—“à l’égal de nos maître les plus chers ou vénérés,” as Mallarmé put it5—he entered the mainstream of French poetry. 2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review 2 : 335; all further references to this work, abbreviated “FPV,” will be included in the text.3. Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” Oeuvres completes, p. 662.4. Baudelaire, “Le Poème du hachisch,” Oeuvres complètes, 1:427.5. Mallarmé, “Scolies,” Oeuvres completes, p. 223. James Lawler, Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet as Analyst, and René Char: The Myth and the Poem. He is currently completing a study of Buadelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. (shrink)

One of the key concepts in autonomist Marxism is the ‘general intellect’. As capitalism develops, labour and its products become increasingly ‘immaterial’, inasmuch as the physical side of production is taken over by automated systems. The result is that all aspects of the collective worker's affective, desiring and cognitive capabilities are now brought to bear on production itself. This problematises capitalistic notions of proprietary control, because it raises the possibility that the mass ‘cognitive worker’, and the inherently co-operative principles (...) it embodies, can detach itself from neoliberal mechanisms of subsumption and valorisation and lay the foundation for a new communalistic ethos. What is intriguing is that several autonomists evoke the work of Mikhail Bakhtin vis-à-vis the ‘general intellect’. Bakhtin did maintain that dialogism is an irreducibly collective phenomenon, and that we all contribute to the continuous making and remaking of language. We do not ‘own’ the words we use; as such, meaning is necessarily plural and heterogeneous, the product of the interaction of many texts and voices that can only be pragmatically and contingently unified. The present article seeks to explore the connection between Bakhtin and autonomism, focusing on the insight that communication is always ‘more than myself’, and hence integral to the ‘social brain’ that is a shared legacy, our ‘commonwealth’. It also raises the possibility of a more ‘troublesome’ Bakhtin than is generally countenanced by the liberal academy, and a concomitantly ‘dangerous’ dialogism that haunts a digitalised and networked world marked in equal measure by tremendous emancipatory promise and catastrophic threat. (shrink)

In The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is the Perfect Semiotic Fitting Kull makes a foray into the concept of Beauty. His target article is a welcome contribution not only for providing a biosemiotic notion of beauty but also as a trigger for further enquiry into the matter. Additionally, Kull delivers a new concept: Semiotic Fitting, shining new light on the Umwelt theory. My commentary embraces the challenge Kull presents. Offering an alternate view on beauty, as a matter, and product, (...) of cognition, I suggest reflecting on the philosophy of Alexander von Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetics”, offers rich insight that could extend and enrich the definition of beauty Kull presents. (shrink)

In The Biosemiotic Fundamentals of Aesthetics: Beauty is the Perfect Semiotic Fitting Kull makes a foray into the concept of Beauty. His target article is a welcome contribution not only for providing a biosemiotic notion of beauty but also as a trigger for further enquiry into the matter. Additionally, Kull delivers a new concept: Semiotic Fitting, shining new light on the Umwelt theory. My commentary embraces the challenge Kull presents. Offering an alternate view on beauty, as a matter, and product, (...) of cognition, I suggest reflecting on the philosophy of Alexander von Baumgarten, who coined the term “aesthetics”, offers rich insight that could extend and enrich the definition of beauty Kull presents. (shrink)

Anyone who comes to read some of Aquinas' works and at the same time looks around for modern discussions of them will be struck by two things: first, the greater part of the latter is the product of American and European Catholic neo-scholasticism; and second, that, with a few distinguished exceptions,1 what is contributed by writers of the analytical tradition is often a blend of uninformed generalizations and some suspicion that what Aquinas presents is not so much independent philosophy as (...) propaganda for the cause of Christian theology. (shrink)

‘The art of living with ICTs ’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes (...) and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective. (shrink)

Did we get Aquinas’ Epistemology right? St. Thomas is often interpreted according to Kantian principles, particularly in Transcendental Thomism. When this happens, it can appear as though Aquinas, too—along with Kant—had made the “turn to the subject”; as if Aquinas were no longer the Aristotelian “believer” who thinks nature is what it is but, instead, the Kantian “thinker” who holds that nature is what we think of it; as if St. Thomas, like Kant, had concluded that nature is intelligible not (...) only when we think of it, but because we think of it. After much struggle with this problem, the challenge seemed obvious to me: to show the radical difference between Aquinas and Kant. Kant had reasons to make his turn, his Copernican revolution. Could I explain those reasons, could I pinpoint the problem leading Kant to think in those terms? Could I show Aquinas facing the same problem and clearly taking a different direction in his proposed solution? That is what I have tried to do in this book. This book provides an interpretation of Aquinas’ agent intellect focusing on Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, and proposing that the agent intellect is a metaphysical rather than a formal a priori of human understanding. A formal a priori is responsible for the intelligibility as content of the object of human understanding and is related to Kant’s epistemological views, whereas a metaphysical a priori is responsible for intelligibility as mode of being of this same object. We can find in Aquinas’ text many indications that the agent intellect is not productive of the intelligible object but is, rather, productive of the abstracted or intelligible mode of being of this object. This is because for Aquinas the universal as nature, which is the object of human understanding, is present in the things themselves but with a different mode of being. In this four-chapter book, Chapter 1 is intended to establish the fact which requires for Aquinas an agent intellect, and provides two very important principles: one is that the object of human understanding (the universal as nature) is present in the things themselves and, the other, that it is not in the things themselves with a mode of being which makes it available to the intellectual eye. These two principles lead us to the main point of Chapter 2, namely the distinction between the intelligible object and its intelligible mode of being. Now, because knowing is receptive of the intelligible object (Chapter 3), which is present in the things themselves (Chapter 1), the agent intellect is productive not of the object’s intelligible content, but of its abstracted or intelligible mode of being (Chapter 4). (shrink)

This book is the first to articulate and challenge the consensus on the right and left that knowledge is the key to any problem, demonstrating how the left’s embrace of knowledge productivity keeps it trapped within capital’s circuits. As the knowledge economy has forced questions of education to the forefront, the book engages pedagogy as an underlying yet neglected motor of capitalism and its forms of oppression. Most importantly, it assembles new pedagogical resources for responding to the range of injustices (...) that permeate our world. Building on yet critiquing the Marxist notion of the general intellect, Derek R. Ford theorizes stupidity as a necessary alternative pedagogical logic, an anti-value that is infinitely mute and unproductive. (shrink)

Carl Stumpf, in his Spinozastudien, presents the Aristotelico-Scholastic thesis of the “parallelism” between mental acts and contents, i.e., the thesis that “the essential differences and divisions of the acts run in parallel to those of the contents, since they are determined in their specificity by the latter.” In his paper, Stumpf also distinguishes between passive and active accounts of intellection in the history of philosophy. Now, Stumpf, in his own theory of intentionality, has rather an active account of intellection: he (...) holds that the contents of abstract presentations and judgments are “products” of these acts. Stumpf does not explicitly give a historical precedent for his position. In this note, I would like to discuss Stumpf’s historical narrative concerning the active accounts of intellection, as well as to complete this narrative with information about some prior philosophical positions resembling Stumpf’s own views on psychic products. (shrink)

Completing the systematic henadological interpretation of Proclus' Platonic Theology begun in "The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus" (Méthexis 21, 2008, pp. 131-143) and "The Second Intelligible Triad and the Intelligible-Intellective Gods" (Methexis 23, 2010, pp. 137-157), the present article concerns the conditions of the emergence of fully mediated, diacritical multiplicity out of the polycentric henadic manifold. The product of the activity of the intellective Gods (that is, the product of the intellective activity of Gods as such), in (...) resolving the contradiction between existential uniqueness and universalizable potencies in the divine natures, also grounds the human exercise of phi- losophical cognition in the founding self-analysis of divine individuals. (shrink)

Continuing the systematic henadological interpretation of Proclus' Platonic Theology begun in "The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus" (Methexis 21, 2008, pp. 131-143), the present article treats of the basic characteristics of intelligible-intellective (or noetico-noeric) multiplicity and its roots in henadic individuality. Intelligible-intellective multiplicity (the hypostasis of Life) is at once a universal organization of Being in its own right, and also transitional between the polycentric henadic manifold, in which each individual is immediately productive of absolute Being, (...) and the formal intellective organization, which is monocentrically and diacritically disposed. Intelligible-intellective multiplicity is generated from the dyadic relationship of henads to their power(s), the phase of henadic individuality expressed in the second intelligible triad, and is mediated, unlike the polycentric manifold, but not by identity and difference, like the intellective organization. Instead, the hypostasis of Life is constituted by ideal motility and spatiality, figural dispositions, and the intersubjective relations depicted in the divine symposium of Plato's Phaedrus. (shrink)

Completing the systematic henadological interpretation of Proсlus’ Platonic Theology begun in The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proclus (“Méthexis” 21, 2008, pp. 131-143) and The Second Intelligible Triad and the Intelligible-Intellective Gods (“Méthexis” 23, 2010, pp. 137-157), the present article concerns the conditions of the emergence of fully mediated, diacritical multiplicity out of the polycentric henadic manifold. The product of the activity of the intellective Gods (that is, the product of the intellective activity of Gods as such), in (...) resolving the contradiction between existential uniqueness and universalizable potencies in the divine natures, also grounds the human exercise of philosophical cognition in the founding self-analysis of divine individuals. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of the function (...) of the agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way. (shrink)

Dans mon article, je vais essayer de développer une analyse de deux des plus importants chapitres du De anima d'Aristote : les chapitres 4 et 5 du livre III, où Aristote propose son traitement de la question de l'intellect. Sans entrer dans les détails de l'histoire de l'interprétation de ce texte, je propose d'identifier l'intellect dit ‘passif’ avec quelques traits distinctifs de la puissance de la phantasia ou imagination, et ce que l'on appelle ‘l'intelligence productive’ avec l'environnement (...) cosmique, qui, en vertu de ses régularités, produit les habitats qui vont agir sur la puissance sensorielle de l'être humain et qui, dans la production des expériences sensorielles de l'être humain, fera passer son esprit du statut d'intellect passif à celui d'intellectus in habitu. (shrink)

Aristotle’s chapter on productive mind (De Anima III.5) and its comparison of this mind to light are best understood as a careful revision to Plato’s Sun-Good analogy from Republic VI. Through a rigorous juxtaposed reading of De Anima II.7 on vision and III.5 on thinking, one can see how Aristotle is almost wholeheartedly taking up Plato’s analogy between vision and thought. When one accounts for all the detail of Aristotle’s explanation of light and vision in II.7 by seeing that (...) chapter as anticipating III.5, an interpretation of productive intellect emerges which reconciles the main opposing views on the question that have long divided interpreters: whether the productive intellect discussed in De Anima III.5 is human or divine. (shrink)

I lay out and examine two sharply conflicting interpretations of Aristotle's claims about nous in the De Anima (DA). On the human separability approach, Aristotle is taken to have identified reasons for thinking that the intellect can, in some way, exist on its own. On the naturalist approach, the soul, including intellectual soul, is inseparable from the body of which it is the form. I discuss how proponents of each approach deal with the key texts from the DA, focusing (...) on four of the most important and interesting topics in this area. Two of these topics concern the activity of understanding (noêsis): first, what does Aristotle mean when he claims that the intellect cannot have a bodily organ and, secondly, what role does Aristotle think phantasmata (“images” or “representations”) play in understanding something? Two of the topics concern DA 3.5, one of the most difficult passages in Aristotle's corpus: first, what is the nature and role of the productive intellect (nous poiêtikos) introduced there and, secondly, what are this chapter's implications for the question of whether the intellect or intellectual soul can exist apart from the body? I conclude by identifying areas where further research is necessary. (shrink)

Dans mon article, je vais essayer de développer une analyse de deux des plus importants chapitres du De anima d'Aristote : les chapitres 4 et 5 du livre III, où Aristote propose son traitement de la question de l'intellect (Nous). Sans entrer dans les détails de l'histoire de l'interprétation de ce texte, je propose d'identifier l'intellect dit ‘passif’ avec quelques traits distinctifs de la puissance de la phantasia ou imagination, et ce que l'on appelle ‘l'intelligence productive’ avec (...) l'environnement cosmique, qui, en vertu de ses régularités, produit les habitats qui vont agir sur la puissance sensorielle de l'être humain et qui, dans la production des expériences sensorielles de l'être humain, fera passer son esprit du statut d'intellect passif à celui d'intellectus in habitu. (shrink)

Themistius's (ca. 317–ca. 388 C.E.) paraphrase of the De Anima is an influential and important work; however, it is not now regarded as profound or original and thereby suffers from neglect. I argue that Themistius is misunderstood on the matter of Aristotle's productive and potential intellects. It is commonly held that Themistius gives to the productive intellect the role of illuminating images in order to produce universal thoughts in the potential intellect with epistemic certainty. I argue (...) that Themistius's productive intellect does not transform images to reveal the forms contained therein, but gives to the potential intellect the ability, first, to organize our sense-experiences in the course of acquiring rudimentary universal concepts and, then, to discover the forms of things by ordinary discursive thinking. (shrink)

Many contemporary scholars argue that Schelling’s version of intellectual intuition retains certain central features of the Kantian and Fichtean conceptions. One of the common claims is that, as with Kant and Fichte, Schelling’s intellectual intuition is the power of the subject’s productive understanding. However, we show that for the Schelling of the Identitätsphilosophie period, intellectual intuition is the power not of an understanding that intuits, or a productive intellect, but of a receptive and penetrating sensibility that understands.