A Philosophical History of the Concept

Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-1-009-27382-4
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 482 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 843 g

The concept of concept plays a central role in philosophy, serving both as a subject of study in disciplines such as logic, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, and as a methodologically central notion for those who think that philosophy is essentially concerned with analysing, deconstructing, developing, or ameliorating concepts. But what exactly are concepts, and why have they become so significant in philosophy? The chapters of this volume explore critical moments in the history of the concept of concept, investigating why and how philosophers across different eras and cultures have addressed concepts' nature, acquisition, and relationship to the entities to which they apply. Spanning classical Greek to modern Western philosophies, and incorporating Chinese, Indian, and Islamic traditions, the volume examines concepts as means for categorizing the world – tracing their evolution from elements of thought to foundational components of reality, and the transformation of the concept into the key notion of philosophy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Schmid, Stephan

Taieb, Hamid

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: a philosophical history of the concept Stephan Schmid and Hamid Taieb; 1. Concepts in classical Greece: Aristotle and his predecessors Victor Caston; 2. Concepts in Epicurean and Stoic philosophy Gábor Betegh and Voula Tsouna; 3. Concepts in late antiquity Riccardo Chiaradonna; 4. Concepts in early Chinese philosophy Franklin Perkins; 5. Buddhist theory of concepts Monima Chadha; 6. Concepts in Brahmanical philosophy in classical India Dimitry Shevchenko; 7. Concepts in Islamic philosophy Jari Kaukua; 8. Concepts in the Latin medieval tradition Margaret Cameron; 9. Concepts and Ideas in Suárez, Descartes, and Beyond Stephan Schmid; 10. Concepts in British Empiricism Jennifer Marušic; 11. The Leibnizean alternative: logical-conceptual versus presentational models Graciela T. De Pierris; 12. Kant on the Epigenesis of (Empirical) concepts Huaping Lu-Adler; 13. The Concept in German idealism Frederick Beiser; 14. Concept, value and world: Neo-Kantianism, Dilthey and Nietzsche Nicolas de Warren; 15. Concepts in the school of Brentano, Husserl and early phenomenology Hamid Taieb; 16. Two concepts of concept in early analytic philosophy Mark Textor; 17. Concepts in Pragmatism Catherine Legg; 18. Concepts, meaning and use: Wittgenstein and his legacy Hans-Johann Glock; 19. Concepts in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer Taylor Crman; 20. Poststructuralist approaches to the concept Henry Somers-Hall; 21. Carnap, Quine, Putnam and Burge on concepts Gary Ebbs; 22. Concepts and conceptual engineering Sarah Sawyer; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Schmid, Stephan
Stephan Schmid is Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg. He is the editor of Philosophy of Mind in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (2018), and the co-editor (with Calvin G. Normore) of Grounding in Medieval Philosophy (2024).

Taieb, Hamid
Hamid Taieb is an Emmy-Noether Research Group Leader at Humboldt University Berlin. He is the author of Relational Intentionality: Brentano and the Aristotelian Tradition (2018).