Method
Understanding
Overview
ability to think about and use concepts to deal adequately with an object
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The understanding was defined above only negatively, as a non-sensuous faculty of cognition. Now, independently of sensibility, we cannot possibly have any intuition; consequently, the understanding is no faculty of intuition. But besides intuition there is no other mode of cognition, except through conceptions; consequently, the cognition of every, at least of every human, understanding is a cognition through…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
The chapter “Section I. Of the Logical Use of the Understanding in Gener…” is titled for Understanding; names Understanding several times.
But this universal is an abstract universal: that is to say, its opposition to the particular is so rigorously maintained, that it is at the same time also reduced to the character of a particular again. In this separating and abstracting attitude towards its objects, Understanding is the reverse of immediate perception and sensation, which, as such, keep completely to their native sphere of action in the concrete.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
Names Understanding several times; states what Understanding is.
In these and in a multitude of similar cases, our Understanding takes for granted the existence of the usual cause with which it is conversant and forthwith perceives it, though our Reason has arrived at the truth by a different road; for, the knowledge of the Understanding being anterior to that of the Reason, the intellect remains inaccessible to the teaching of the Reason, and thus the _illusion_--that is, the…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
The chapter “THE UNDERSTANDING.” is titled for Understanding; names Understanding several times.
Philosophers who discussed Understanding
Related ideas
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Learning
- Person
- Conceptual model
- Knowledge
- Prediction
- Theory
- Inference
- Relation (philosophy)
- Disposition
- On Certainty
- Concept
- Gregory Chaitin
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.