Insight

Despite playing a important role in the history of Philosophy, a mode of cognition that has received little systematic treatment is Insight. Insight is also familiar to non-Philosophers as well, if not from first-hand experience, at least from the witnessing of a detective's sudden realization of the solution to a mystery. Insight seems to elude some of the traditional Epistemological categories. Since the crime was not present to empirical perception, the identity of the killer is not an object of Intuition, nor is its center present in the Intuition of a circle. Peirce briefly suggests that Insight is inferential, but the detective does not arrive at the solution via a process of elimination, and, as Spinoza shows, the adequate definition of a circle does more than posit the existence of its center. Rather, the object of Insight is given as a generative ground, e. g. of the phenomenal clues of the mystery, of the points of a circle. Insight does seem to be a Phenomenological Augenblick, but, again, it is not an Intuition, nor is at an instanteous totalization of particulars, since its object is both not present and a particular. Instead, it does seem to be a mode of Imagination, but not of its traditional species. Since it does not copy a previous perception, it is not reproductive Imagination, and both Productive and Creative Imagination generate novelities. So, 're-creative' or 'reconstructive' Imagination are closer classifications, though neither quite accounts for what the prefix 'in-' of Insight signifies--its penetrating quality.