The Epistemological Role of Intuition in Philosophy

Intuitions are employed in a whole host of philosophical contexts, whether they be intuitions about actual or hypothetical cases or intuitions about general principles. They are tools for your conceptual toolkit. These are tools that can empower you to think critically and carefully and clearly and precisely and rigorously and cautiously about these matters about philosophy more generally. So consider the following paradigmatic examples of contemporary philosophical reasoning in which a philosophical theory is taken to be prima facia undermined by contradicting an intuition regarding a particular case. We'll consider the former method of cases first, after which we will consider general intuitions.