CONCEPTUALISM. - It is the doctrine that denies to general ideas (universals) any objective correspondence in reality, affirming them as pure concepts or forms of the spirit.
The beginnings of conceptualism can already be traced to the doctrine of the Stoa, where the universal concept (χουγή ευγουλία), of undoubted practical importance, is a pure derivation of sensible impressions, almost a condensation of them in memory, to which no content of its own corresponds in reality beyond individual things.
In medieval philosophy, ABELARD (v.) is credited with the explicit defence of conceptualism. In reality, however, Abelard rather intended to combat the extreme solutions given to the problem of universals by Roscellinus and William of Champeaux: against nominalism, which holds that general ideas are ultimately nothing more than words, and realism, which gives them an independent consistency in reality, Abelard affirms the universal as existing essentially in the concept, without, however, denying in the nature of individual things what the general idea expresses. For this reason, Abelard’s position is today interpreted as a moderate realism, or at least as a step toward it (cf. W. Windelband, *History of Philosophy*, vol. 1, Italian trans. by C. Dentice D’Accadia, Palermo-Milan 1937, p. 347).
A rigid conceptualism, which in its further developments even degrades into nominalism, is the position of OCCAM (v.): the universal concept is nothing more than an *intentio* or concept of the soul; nothing real corresponds to it in things; the generic and specific unity of the concept is a pure representational unity created by thought (OCCAM calls universal concepts *fictions*) for the convenience of reference to the many, that is, to individuals, the only existing reality (In I Sent., 2, 8): more or less like the model that an architect creates in the imagination as a guide for external realization.
In modern philosophy, conceptualism is resolved into the Kantian conception, even though it moves on a new gnoseological-metaphysical basis. Universality and necessity, essential qualities of the concept, cannot in any way be derived 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 apply only to the subjective ordering and systematization of experience and tell us nothing about reality in itself. To conceptualism may be linked the various modern forms of grammatical 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 adequate correspondence with the fluid structure of the real. Absolute conceptualism, but in a metaphysical sense, may be said to be the Hegelian and neo-Hegelian transcendental idealism, which resolves all reality into the concept.
A final form of conceptualism may be found in existentialism (v.), according to which only the individual, the existent as such, has value, and refuses to be levelled and lost in any system of universal concepts or models.
Without pretending to reduce all scientific knowledge to general ideas (for indeed rich and fruitful and absolutely necessary is the concrete and analytical knowledge of individual reality, both material—that is, the world—and spiritual—that is, the soul)—it is nonetheless indubitably positive the value of conceptual knowledge. That general ideas are not pure creations of thought but correspond to a foundation of objectivity in the individual beings to which they refer is proven not only by the fact that they arise in the intellect in close continuity and dependence with the characteristics of reality given to us by sensible knowledge and of which they express transcendental or essential values, but also by the highly positive function they exercise in human knowledge, and chiefly in scientific knowledge. Not only philosophy, every philosophy that does not renounce itself, but also science, which uses them with success in its deductions, predictions, and concrete applications, lives by universal concepts; and it certainly cannot, in all its grand systematic development, be reduced to a mere knowledge of thought and its logical forms (v. UNIVERSALS).