Cheryl Foster examines Schopenhauer’s theory of genius, which she situates within a politics of knowledge. Many of our dominant social institutions devalue the arts which are overlooked as potential sources of knowledge. Foster argues that Schopenhauer (despite his own strong resources of bigotry) is in a position to address this injustice by making an argument for the distinction between talent and genius, or conceptual and intuitive understanding, and making a strong argument for the significance and distinctiveness of aesthetic, intuitive cognition. Foster looks carefully at Schopenhauer’s description of the experience of artistic inspiration, the receptivity distinctive of genius that enables artists to create aesthetically significant works. She finds that Schopenhauer has unexpected confirmation in the account Edith Wharton gave of her own artistic process. To realize the potential of Schopenhauer’s analysis, we need to free him from some of his reactionary investments, such as his anti-Semitism, misogyny, elitism, and mystifications. Foster carefully reconstructs a theory of genius and intuitive cognition that is both free from these elements and consistent with the phenomenology of artistic experience as reported by practicing artists. The result is a useful and accurate account of a vital source of nonconceptual knowledge.

Peirce’s early essays have been thought to frame a grand system later developed more fully (’On a New List of Categories’, 1867) and to provide some of that system’s details (the theory of cognition sketched in three 1868–1869 papers). But the formal structure limned was later understood differently: it is an enduring system in appearance only. These essays suggested though they did not consistently express a conceptual idealism in which true thoughts are distinguished from reality by nothing but their incompleteness – a view later contradicted. Yet, with intentional irony, those same essays were in method empirical. Many have damned Peirce’s writings as fragmentary and contradictory, but these would be faults only were he a system-builder. Instead, his conjectures posed obvious problems and were meant to invite inquiries along diverse and mutually inconsistent lines, in which additions and refinements might be made by which those problems can be solved.