Der klassische und der moderne Begriff des Begriffs

Summary

Up to the present day, difficulties have confronted all attempts at establishing a theory of concepts that would comprise the various kinds of concept-formation in the disciplines of the spectrum of sciences. Not a few philosophical dictionaries, under the entry “concept”, still offer doctrines which were current far back in the history of philosophy and have little in common with concept-formations in the sciences of today.

The paper aims at an improvement in this situation. After a sketch of the “classical” notion of concept, already developed in antiquity (essentially a logic of “classification”, although “class-formation” in its present understanding had not yet been conceived), the canonical modern doctrine of concepts is outlined. With an eye to application in the exact sciences, it is shown how in the nineteenth century the view of concept as an additive complex of characteristics yields to a functional approach systematized, in the last quarter of the century, by classical quantificational logic. Almost simultaneously, Mach, Frege, Peano, Weyl and others set out to shape the modern theory of abstraction. It is these two theories that today permit philosophers of science not only to deal with functional processes of concept-formation but also to represent in a formally correct manner metalinguistic propositions about concepts and their properties. Thus it seems that the fundamental tasks of a modern theory of concept have finally been taken care of.