Knowledge of the Material Thing: Intuitive or Acquired

A knower’s intuitive knowledge (whether the exalted necessary being, or sublime abstract beings, or human beings) of the material thing is among the difficult issues in philosophy, about which thinkers disagree and some believe that knowledge does not belong to material things and some believe contrary to that. Various reasons have been stated for non-intuition, some of which return to the material thing itself, some others return to the features of knowledge, and still some others return to the knower’s characteristics. In this article, we seek to deal with this issue from three angles using the method of explanation and description to investigate how each of them is an obstacle. The result of the study is that the feature of extension and dispersal of material things as well as the feature of abstraction of knowledge and existential relation between the knower and the known does not hinder the attribution of knowledge to material things. This is because, firstly, if material things are extended from one aspect, they are non-extended from another aspect. Secondly, abstraction is not the condition for being known. Thirdly, another type of relationship, such as status, can cause intuition.