Gnosology


In philosophy, gnosology literally means the study of gnosis, meaning knowledge or esoteric knowledge. The study of gnosis itself covers a number of subjects, which include magic, noetics, gnostic logic, and logical gnosticism, among others. Gnosology has also been used, particularly by James Hutchison Stirling, to render Johann Gottlieb Fichte's term for his own version of transcendental idealism, Wissenschaftslehre, meaning "Doctrine of Knowledge".
In Immanuel Kant's gnosology, intuition takes a prominent position and was introduced as appearing on two levels: that of sensation and intellectualization. Here, the so-called "intellectus ectypus" derives its knowledge of objects from intuitions of things-in-themselves without the forms of intuition while the "intellectual archetypus" creates the objects of its knowledge through the act of thinking them. Emilii Medtner drew from Kant's gnosology along with the Kantian theory of knowledge to respond to Carl Jung's Zofingia Lectures, particularly to criticize the way intuition was conceived as a knowledge organ that is capable of functioning with validity and independence.