IDEA

An idea (Greek: ιδέα) is a specific thought or concept which arises in the mind of a person as a result of thinking. The term arises in both popular and philosophical terminology.

Philosophy

The view that ideas exist in a realm separate or distinct from real life is a venerable theme in philosophy. This view holds that we only "discover" ideas in the same way that we discover the real world.

Related Topics:
Real life - Philosophy

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In philosophy, the term “idea” is common to all languages and periods, but there is scarcely any term which has been used with so many different shades of meaning.

Related Topics:
Philosophy - Language

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Plato

• Plato utilized the concept of idea in the realm of metaphysics. He asserted that there is realm of Forms or Ideas, of which things in the world are mere imperfect reflections or instantiations.
• From this it follows that these Ideas are the sole reality (see also idealism); in opposition to it are empirical thinkers of various times who find reality in particular physical objects (see hylozoism, empiricism, etc.).

John Locke

• In striking contrast to Plato’s use of idea is that of John Locke, who defines “idea” as “whatever is the object of understanding when a man thinks” (Essay on the Human Understanding (I.), vi. 8). Here the term is applied not to the mental process, but to anything whether physical or intellectual which is the object of it.

David Hume

• Hume differs from Locke by limiting “idea” to the more or less vague mental reconstructions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an “impression.”

Wilhelm Wundt

• Wundt widens the term to include “conscious representation of some object or process of the external world.” In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups.

G. F. Stout & J. M. Baldwin

• G. F. Stout & J. M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, define “idea“ as “the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses.” They point out that an idea and a perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. “Difference in degree of intensity,” “comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject,” “comparative dependence on mental activity,” are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception.

It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool,” he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.

Related Topics:
Abstraction - Centaur - Man - Horse - Mermaid - Woman - Fish

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