Rationality and the Sciences in the Metaphilosophical Perspective

The paper addresses changes in the category of rationality and related categories. It seems obvious that the concept of rationality has to refer to logic (especially that the program 'to apply logic to philosophical problems' has become a Polish tradition). Rationality, logicalness, or discursiveness are frequently opposed to intuitiveness or 'intellectiveness'. The latter in particular enables us to know the philosophical principia (as they were classically understood) and, as a consequence, to attain scientific knowledge, which is ultimately rooted in philosophy. Intuition is distinct from discourse, but is not separate from it. There is a dynamic bond between intuition and discourse. Classically, intuition gives us philosophical knowledge whereas discourse, embodied in logic, extends it to all other knowledge. Modernity replaces the intuition-discourse pair with the empiria-discourse pair, referring it to knowledge in the natural sciences. The ideal of certain knowledge, 'episteme' remains in classical philosophy, whereas with respect to the sciences there has been a 'canonization' of hypothetical knowledge, 'doxa', formerly not regarded as solid knowledge. In philosophical thinking, there often is a 'dialectic', an inter-categorial dynamism, a seeming categorial perverseness. This manifests itself in the ambivalence of some terms (a dynamic 'enantiosemia'); such categories as 'belief' and 'evidence' are telling cases here. Mostly in Western culture we can witness how intuitive thinking has turned into discourse, reaching the extremes of cognitive mechanicism (we have even had an utopian logicism); less frequently, there is conversion into intuition of what is discursive, rational. In brief, on the one hand there are the works of the rational and reasoning mind, and on the other hand there are the works of the intuitive, understanding mind. The tendency favouring discourse is dominant, but intuition in philosophy is essentially irreducible. In the language of scholasticism, one could speak of a dual transcendentale: intelligibile/rationabile.