Conceptualism

CONCEPTUALISM. - It is the doctrine that denies to general ideas (universals) an objective correspondence in reality, affirming them as pure concepts or forms of the spirit.

The beginnings of c. can already be identified in the doctrine of the Stoa, where the universal concept (κοινῷ ἔνναυσ), of undoubted practical importance, is a pure derivative of sense impressions, almost a condensation of them in memory, to which no proper content corresponds in reality, beyond individual things.

In medieval philosophy the explicit defense of c. is attributed to Abelard (v.). But in reality Abelard intended rather to combat the extreme solutions given to the problem of universals by Roscelin and William of Champeaux: against nominalism, for which general ideas are ultimately nothing more than words, and realism, which gives them a consistency of their own in reality, Abelard affirms that the universal exists essentially in the concept, without however denying in the nature of individual things what the general idea expresses. For this reason there is today a tendency to interpret Abelard's position in the sense of a moderate realism, or at least of a movement toward it (cf. W. Windelband, Storia della filos., I, Italian trans. by C. Dentice D'Accadia, Palermo-Milan 1937, p. 347).

Rigid c., which indeed in its further determinations degenerates into nominalism, is the position of Ockham (v.): the universal concept is nothing but an intentio or conceptio animae; nothing real corresponds to it in things; the generic and specific unity of the concept is a pure representative unity created by thought (fictiones Ockham calls universal concepts) for the convenience of reference to the many, that is, to individuals, the only reality that exists (In I Sent., 2, 8): more or less like the model that the architect creates in his imagination as a guide to external realization.

In modern philosophy the Kantian conception, although moving on a new gnoseological-metaphysical basis, in truth resolves itself into c. Universality and necessity, essential qualities of the concept, are in no way derivable from experience, but come solely from thought. The categories, that is, the general modes according to which we think objects, are pure original forms of the mind that hold only for the ordering and subjective systematization of experience, and tell us nothing of reality in itself. To c. one may approximate the various modern forms of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism, particularly the Bergsonian position which, because of its particular conception of dynamic reality, denies to the concept, stable in the representation of essence, the possibility of an adequation to the fluid structure of the real. Absolute c., but in a metaphysical sense, may be said of the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian transcendental idealism that resolves all reality in the concrete concept. A final form of c. can be found in existentialism (v.), for which what has value is only the single individual, the existent as such, which does not wish to be leveled and lost in any system of concepts or universal models.

Without claiming to reduce all scientific knowledge to general ideas (rich and fruitful and absolutely necessary is in fact the concrete and analytic knowledge of individual reality, both material, that is, the world, and spiritual, that is, the soul), the value of conceptual knowledge is nonetheless undoubtedly positive. That general ideas are not pure creations of thought, but that a foundation of objectivity in the individual beings to which they refer corresponds to them, is proved not only by the fact that they arise in the intellect in strict continuity and dependence with the characters of the real that are given to us by sense knowledge and of which they express the transcendental or essential values, but also by the highly positive function they exercise in human knowledge, and principally in scientific knowing. Not only philosophy lives on universal concepts — every philosophy that does not renounce itself — but also science, which uses them, and with success, in its deductions, predictions and concrete applications, and which certainly cannot, in all its grandiose systematic development, be reduced to a simple knowledge of thought and its logical forms (v. UNIVERSALI).

Ugo Viglino