My research can be situated in the intersection of the broad areas of epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The fundamental question that drives it is the question about how to integrate metaphysics of necessity with its epistemology. I approach this question from the standpoint of philosophical methodology and the role of thought experiments and a priori intuitions in it.

    In the dissertation I focus on a current debate in modal epistemology that concerns the nature of intellectual intuitions and their relations to a priori knowledge. The importance on getting clear on the nature and the role of intuition in a priori inquiry lies in that intuitions are widely used in establishing philosophical claims, and we need to be able to articulate why is it that they have epistemic authority concerning such claims.
Philosophical tradition as well as the contemporary debate takes intuition's epistemic work to consist in being evidence for a priori knowledge of philosophical claims. The disagreement is only about whether intellectual intuitions are good or bad evidence for such claims.  The evidential view of intuitions is entailed by the acceptance of the phenomenological conception of intuition, according to which the nature and epistemic role intellectual intuition is analogous to the nature and epistemic role of empirical intuitions (most notably perceptual, or introspective seemings).
    I have two goals in the dissertation. First, I reject this widely accepted view that intuitions are evidence for a priori knowledge of philosophical claims. I argue for an alternative view; namely, that, at best, intuitions are evidence of having such knowledge. The first view treats intuitions as providing justification or grounding for a priori knowledge of philosophical claims, the second as expressing or manifestation it. I explain that intuitions cannot be evidence or grounds for a priori knowledge of philosophical claims because reflection on the structure of the evidence-for and justification-for relations shows that intuitions and what they are about cannot be the relata of such relations. Worse, the view that intuitions are evidence (justification) for a priori knowledge of philosophical claims, I argue, invites skepticism about a priori knowledge. Since the claim that intuitions are evidence is entailed by the phenomenological conception of intellectual intuition, I argue we should reject such conception.
    This leads me to the second goal in the dissertation, which is to offer what I think is a better way of characterizing the nature and epistemic role of intellectual intuition, one that guarantees the epistemic authority of intuition with respect to both reliability and rationality. According to my account (which is in a broad Platonic tradition, based as it is on an analogy with non-empirical memory), the correct view about the nature of intuition is dispositional, rather than phenomenological. This means that a mental state is an intuition just in case it is a manifestation of antecedent knowledge of concepts, and which, if expressed, manifests knowledge of analytic truths in Kant’s sense. On my account, since intuitions manifest knowledge, they have a very high degree of reliability, namely, they are infallible.  As for their rationality, it is obviously rational to rely on something one knows.