What is a concept? A twenty-two-chapter inquiry from Cambridge

One of the words used most often in philosophy is concept.

“The concept of justice”, “conceptual analysis”, “conceptual confusion”, “clarifying our concepts”. It is next to impossible to read a page of philosophy without meeting the word.

So what is a concept?

The collection published by Cambridge University Press in January this year asks exactly that: A Philosophical History of the Concept.

The editors are Stephan Schmid (University of Hamburg) and Hamid Taieb (Humboldt University, Berlin).

Why a history?#

The book takes its start from an observation the editors make in their introduction. Concepts play a central part in Western philosophy and in its history; logic, epistemology and philosophy of mind, among other core subfields, take concepts directly as their subject.

But the term “concept” has not meant the same thing across the history of philosophy.

This is no ordinary point about terminology. What you count as a concept determines what you count as philosophy.

A few examples.

If a concept is a mental image, philosophy becomes a species of introspection.

If a concept is a linguistic competence, philosophy is the analysis of language.

If a concept is an abstract object independent of any mind, philosophy is an enterprise of discovery.

If a concept is a rule of inference, philosophy moves towards logic.

One word, four different descriptions of a discipline.

A scope that is very nearly global#

The most striking feature of the book is that its range is not confined to the history of Western philosophy.

Across twenty-two chapters the volume begins with ancient Greece and extends to Chinese philosophy, Buddhist and Brahmanical thought, Islamic philosophy, medieval scholasticism, Descartes, Kant, German idealism, phenomenology, analytic philosophy, Heidegger, poststructuralism and, at the end, conceptual engineering.

That last heading is a contemporary one. Conceptual engineering is a subfield that has grown quickly over the past decade, and its question is this: should we be content to analyse our concepts, or should we also be trying to make them better?

Take an example. Defining the concept of knowledge in a way faithful to current usage is one task. Redesigning the concept of knowledge so that it makes the injustices of knowledge production visible is quite another.

The second task assumes that philosophy is not a descriptive but a constructive activity.

Why Islamic philosophy matters here#

That the collection gives Islamic philosophy a chapter of its own bears directly on the Ahmet Arslan file we ran today.

Recall Arslan's objection to the orientalist thesis of “transmission”: the function of the Islamic philosophers was not to carry ancient thought to the West; they framed their own problems and produced original solutions to them.

The argument about concepts offers one of the concrete proofs of this. The theory that al-Farabi and Ibn Sina developed around the terms ma'na and tasawwur is not a simple translation of Aristotle's account of the concept. When Ibn Sina's doctrine of mental existence (al-wujud al-dhihni) passed into Latin scholasticism, it reconstituted the medieval debate about concepts.

The history of “the concept”, in short, cannot be written without going through Baghdad.

Why it matters to a philosophy news desk#

This is a book in which philosophy examines its own instruments — the area the literature calls metaphilosophy.

And metaphilosophy sits at the centre of two arguments this column has followed in the past week.

The first is the quarrel over experimental philosophy we covered today: the disputants keep missing one another because they cannot agree on what is meant by “conceptual analysis”.

The second is the argument over criteria for machine consciousness: what are the conditions for applying the concept of consciousness to a system?

Both are looking at the same ground. What is it to apply a concept?

Also on our desk#

Eric Dietrich, Chris Fields, John P. Sullins, Bram Van Heuveln and Robin Zebrowski — Great Philosophical Objections to Artificial Intelligence (2nd edition, 2026).

An expanded edition of a book gathering seventy years of philosophical objections to the capacities of artificial intelligence. It rebuilds the classical arguments, from Gödel to Turing — meaning, mind, consciousness, creativity and ethics — in the setting of large language models and generative systems.

A convenient way in for anyone looking for the historical background to the debate about artificial consciousness we have been following this week.

For Turkish readers#

A Philosophical History of the Concept is not the sort of collection that can be used as a course book; its bulk and its technical density rule that out.

But it could be brought into Turkish chapter by chapter. The chapters on Islamic philosophy, Chinese thought and conceptual engineering in particular are of a kind that could be used directly in graduate seminars in Turkey.

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Details: Stephan Schmid & Hamid Taieb (eds.) · A Philosophical History of the Concept · Cambridge University Press · published online 30 January 2026 · in English

Note: no Turkish translation has yet been announced.