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Populär Culture Review
foundation of all philosophy. His great contribution to epistemology was his
supposed discovery of the fourteen fundamental concepts that are necessary for
there to be any experience at all, the fourteen “categories of the mind” that are
the precondition for conscious engagement with the world itself. These a priori
concepts, he argued, include such things as “Space,” “Time,” “Causality,” and
“Number.”
In the twentieth-century, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida also came
to focus on concepts. Deleuze defmes philosophy as “the activity of creating
concepts.”9 And Derrida argues that our concepts are not universal and not a
reflection of a reality that is “out there” in some objective scientific sense, but
rather all of our concepts are constructs that carve up a malleable world.10 The
world can be carved up, that is, in an infinite number of ways. Concepts, and the
language that embodies them, are used to keep the chaos at bay, but they do not
reflect anything universally true or necessary in the old, metaphysical senses of
such terms.
In English we get the word “concept” from the Latin “conceptus”
which is from the past participle of “concipere.” “Concipere” means “to
conceive” (literally, “to take with”—also related to the Old French “concevoir”).
“Conceiving” thus indicates a mental apprehending and a pregnancy, but also a
“taking.” As a result, a concept is a “taking with.” It means we apprehend the
world anew, give birth to a new world by becoming pregnant with a new
worldview. We take things together that we did not take together before.
Multiple trees are now seen as part of “Tree,” for instance. The concept does this
work for us.
It is importan BF