Idea

right|thumb|250px|[[Plato, one of the first philosophers to discuss ideas in detail. Aristotle claims that many of Plato's views were Pythagorean in origin.]]

In philosophy and in common usage, an idea (from the Greek word: ἰδέα (idea), meaning 'a form, or a pattern') is the result of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of being. The capacity to create and understand the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings.

An idea arises in a reflexive, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection, for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place. A new or an original idea can often lead to innovation. Our actions are based upon beliefs, beliefs are patterns or organized sets of ideas.

Etymology

The word idea comes from Greek , , , from the root of , .

History

An argument over the underlying nature of ideas was opened by Plato, whose exposition of his theory of forms—which recurs and accumulates over the course of his many dialogs—appropriates and adds a new sense to the Greek word for things that are "seen" (re. εἶδος) that highlights those elements of perception which are encountered without material or objective reference available to the eyes (re. ἰδέα). As this argument was disseminated the word "idea" began to take on connotations that would be more familiarly associated with the term today. In the fifth book of his Republic, Plato defines philosophy as the love of this formal (as opposed to visual) way of seeing.

Plato advanced the theory that perceived but immaterial objects of awareness constitute a realm of deathless forms or ideas from which the material world emanates. Aristotle challenged Plato in this area, positing that the phenomenal world of ideas arises as mental composites of remembered observations. Though it is anachronistic to apply these terms to thinkers from antiquity, it clarifies the argument between Plato and Aristotle if we call Plato an idealist thinker and Aristotle an empiricist thinker.

This antagonism between empiricism and idealism generally characterizes the dynamism of the argument over the theory of ideas up to the present. This schism in theory has never been resolved to the satisfaction of thinkers from both sides of the disagreement and is represented today in the split between analytic and continental schools of philosophy. Persistent contradictions between classical physics and quantum mechanics may be pointed to as a rough analogy for the gap between the two schools of thought.

Philosophy

Plato

Plato in Ancient Greece was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas and of the thinking process (in Plato's Greek the word idea carries a rather different sense of our modern English term). Plato argued in dialogues such as the Phaedo, Symposium, Republic, and Timaeus that there is a realm of ideas or forms (eidei), which exist independently of anyone who may have thoughts on these ideas, and it is the ideas which distinguish mere opinion from knowledge, for unlike material things which are transient and liable to contrary properties, ideas are unchanging and nothing but just what they are. Consequently, Plato seems to assert forcefully that material things can only be the objects of opinion; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas. Furthermore, ideas for Plato appear to serve as universals; consider the following passage from the Republic:

René Descartes

Descartes often wrote of the meaning of the idea as an image or representation, often but not necessarily "in the mind", which was well known in the vernacular. Despite Descartes' invention of the non-Platonic use of the term, he at first followed this vernacular use.b In his Meditations on First Philosophy he says, "Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it is to these alone that the name 'idea' properly belongs." He sometimes maintained that ideas were innate and uses of the term idea diverge from the original primary scholastic use. He provides multiple non-equivalent definitions of the term, uses it to refer to as many as six distinct kinds of entities, and divides ideas inconsistently into various genetic categories. For him knowledge took the form of ideas and philosophical investigation is devoted to the consideration of these entities.

John Locke

John Locke's use of idea stands in striking contrast to Plato's. In his Introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines idea as "that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; And I could not avoid frequently using it." He said he regarded the contribution offered in his essay as necessary to examine our own abilities and discern what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. In this style of ideal conception other outstanding figures followed in his footsteps — Hume and Kant in the 18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper in the 20th century. Locke always believed in the good sense — not pushing things to extremes and while taking fully into account the plain facts of the matter. He prioritized common-sense ideas that struck him as "good-tempered, moderate, and down-to-earth."

As John Locke studied humans in his work "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" he continually referenced Descartes for ideas as he asked this fundamental question: "When we are concerned with something about which we have no certain knowledge, what rules or standards should guide how confident we allow ourselves to be that our opinions are right?" Put in another way, he inquired into how humans might verify their ideas, and considered the distinctions between different types of ideas. Locke found that an idea "can simply mean some sort of brute experience." He shows that there are "No innate principles in the mind." Thus, he concludes that "our ideas are all experienced in nature." An experience can either be a sensation or a reflection: "consider whether there are any innate ideas in the mind before any are brought in by the impression from sensation or reflection." Complex ideas, therefore, can either be modes, substances, or relations.

Modes combine simpler ideas in order to convey new information. For instance, David Banach gives the example of beauty as a mode. He points to combinations of color and form as qualities constitutive of this mode. Substances, however, are distinct from modes. Substances convey the underlying formal unity of certain objects, such as dogs, cats, or tables. Relations represent the relationship between two or more ideas that contain analogous elements to one another without the implication of underlying formal unity. A painting or a piece of music, for example, can both be called 'art' without belonging to the same substance. They are related as forms of art (the term 'art' in this illustration would be a 'mode of relations'). In this way, Locke concluded that the formal ambiguity around ideas he initially sought to clarify had been resolved.

David Hume

Hume differs from Locke by limiting idea to only one of two possible types of perception. The other one is called "impression", and is more lively: these are perceptions we have "when we hear, or see, or feel, or love, or hate, or desire, or will." Ideas are more complex and are built upon these more basic and more grounded perceptions. Hume shared with Locke the basic empiricist premise that it is only from life experiences (whether their own or others') that humans' knowledge of the existence of anything outside of themselves can be ultimately derived, that they shall carry on doing what they are prompted to do by their emotional drives of varying kinds. In choosing the means to those ends, they shall follow their accustomed associations of ideas.d Hume has contended and defended the notion that "reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions'."

Immanuel Kant

left|thumb|135px|"Modern Book Printing" from the [[Walk of Ideas]]

Immanuel Kant defines ideas by distinguishing them from concepts. Concepts arise by the compositing of experience into abstract categorial representations of presumed or encountered empirical objects whereas the origin of ideas, for Kant, is a priori to experience. Regulative ideas, for example, are ideals that one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized as objects of empirical experience. Liberty, according to Kant, is an idea whereas "tree" (as an abstraction covering all species of trees) is a concept. The autonomy of the rational and universal subject is opposed to the determinism of the empirical subject. Kant felt that it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy he thought was not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgement of good common sense.e

Rudolf Steiner

Whereas Kant declares limits to knowledge ("we can never know the thing in itself"), in his epistemological work, Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as "objects of experience" which the mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light. In Goethean Science (1883), he declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye of perception perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." He holds this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt widens the term from Kant's usage 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.

Charles Sanders Peirce

C. S. Peirce published the first full statement of pragmatism in his important works "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) and "The Fixation of Belief" (1877). In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" he proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as synonymic) is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized wherever it is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask ourselves what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a proposed solution to the problem at hand. Pragmatism (a term he appropriated for use in this context), he defended, was a method for ascertaining the meaning of terms (as a theory of meaning). The originality of his ideas is in their rejection of what was accepted as a view and understanding of knowledge as impersonal facts which had been accepted by scientists for some 250 years. Peirce contended that we acquire knowledge as participants, not as spectators. He felt "the real", sooner or later, is composed of information that has been acquired through ideas and knowledge and ordered by the application of logical reasoning. The rational distinction of the empirical object is not prior to its perception by a knowledgeable subject, in other words. He also published many papers on logic in relation to ideas.

G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin

G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, define the 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. writes Walter Benjamin in the introduction to his The Origin of German Tragic Drama. "The set of concepts which assist in the representation of an idea lend it actuality as such a configuration. For phenomena are not incorporated into ideas. They are not contained in them. Ideas are, rather, their objective virtual arrangement, their objective interpretation."

Benjamin advances, "That an idea is that moment in the substance and being of a word in which this word has become, and performs, as a symbol." as George Steiner summarizes.

Relationship of ideas to confidentiality agreements

Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements are legal instruments that assist corporations and individuals in keeping ideas from escaping to the general public. Generally, these instruments are covered by contract law.

Notes

References

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1973 .
Dictionary of the History of Ideas Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1973–74, .

:: - Nous

:: ¹ Volume IV 1a, 3a

:: ² Volume IV 4a, 5a

:: ³ Volume IV 32−37

:: Ideas

:: Ideology

:: Authority

:: Education

:: Liberalism

:: Idea of God

:: Pragmatism

:: Chain of Being

The Story of Thought, DK Publishing, Bryan Magee, London, 1998, ,

: a.k.a. The Story of Philosophy, Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2001,

:: (subtitled on cover: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy).

:: a Plato, pp. 1117, 24−1, 42, 50, 59, 77, 142, 144, 150.

:: b Descartes, pp. 78, 84 - 89, 91, 95, 102, 136−137, 190, 191.

:: c Locke, pp. 59−61, 102−109, 122−124, 142, 185.

:: d Hume, pp. 61, 103, 112−117, 142−143, 155, 185.

:: e Kant, pp. 9, 38, 57, 87, 103, 119, 131−137, 149, 182.

:: f Peirce, pp. 61, How to Make Our Ideas Clear 186−187 and 189.

:: g Saint Augustine, pp. 30, 144; City of God 51, 52, 53 and The Confessions 50, 51, 52.

:: − additional in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas for Saint Augustine and Neo-Platonism

:: h Stoics, pp. 22, 40, 44; The governing philosophy of the Roman Empire on pp. 46−47.

:: − additional in Dictionary of the History of Ideas for Stoics, also here [https://web.archive.org/web/20071213122327/http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/ot2www-dhi?specfile=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Fdhi%2Fdhi.o2w&act=text&offset=11461153&query=stoics&tag=CHANGING+CONCEPTS+OF+MATTER+FROM+ANTIQUITY+TO+NEWTON], and here [https://web.archive.org/web/20071213122327/http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/ot2www-dhi?specfile=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Fdhi%2Fdhi.o2w&act=text&offset=11461153&query=stoics&tag=CHANGING+CONCEPTS+OF+MATTER+FROM+ANTIQUITY+TO+NEWTON], and here [https://web.archive.org/web/20071210182051/http://etext.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/ot2www-dhi?specfile=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Fdhi%2Fdhi.o2w&act=text&offset=17347564&query=stoics&tag=ETHICS+OF+STOICISM].

The Reader's Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition 1965, Thomas Y. Crowell Company,

:: An Encyclopedia of World Literature.

:: ¹ap. 774 Plato ( 427–348 BC).

:: ²ap. 779 Francesco Petrarca.

:: ³ap. 770 Charles Sanders Peirce.

:: ¹bp. 849 the Renaissance.

This article incorporates text from the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, a publication now in the public domain.