Non-existence intuition: remarks on William of Ockham’s cognitio intuitiva from a metaphysical standpoint

Abstract

This article examines the intuitive cognition in William of Ockham, in comparison to other operations of the intellective soul, as abstraction and judgement, and to what he defines as “evidence”. A particular attention is paid to the borderline case of the “non-existence intuition” and the reason why Ockham brings it up, besides his answer to the question of God’s almightiness as his opponent W. Chatton challenges him. The non-existence intuition is here considered from the perspective of the contingent conditions of knowledge and of the necessity of an utmost foundation for it as a whole, in an epistemological frame opposed to the metaphysics of participation and the realism of universals, such as it is radically based on the individual. Despite the difficulties matching up non-existence intuition with the Ockhamist theory of knowledge, it fits in well with its metaphysical implications. Thus there is a coherence in Ockham’s solution of a divine action which causes an intuition of a non-existent being by a straightforward act of belief in the intellect, that is to say, an intervention in the will, which exposes the intellect to its own boundaries so as to its negation. The appeal to a divine action were so required for its conditions of absolute “outsiderness” to the relation between intellect and thing.