What is a concept? Philosophers have given many different answers to this question, reflecting a wide variety of approaches to the study of mind and language. Nonetheless, at the most general level, there are two dominant frameworks in contemporary philosophy. One proposes that concepts are mental representations, while the other proposes that they are abstract objects. This paper looks at the differences between these two approaches, the prospects for combining them, and the issues that are involved in the dispute. We (...) argue that powerful motivations have been offered in support of both frameworks. This suggests the possibility of combining the two. Unlike Frege, we hold that the resulting position is perfectly coherent and well worth considering. Nonetheless, we argue that it should be rejected along with the view that concepts are abstract objects. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy has had a difficult relationship with its own history. One extreme view conceives of the task of philosophy purely in terms of solving certain given problems, and considers the history of philosophy to have no more relevance to this project than the history of physics has to physics itself. Certainly the history of philosophy is an important intellectual discipline, they argue, but just as physicists do not need to read Newton’s Principia in order to make progress, philosophers do (...) not need to read Aristotle or Kant. At the other extreme are the sceptics who believe that creative philosophy is, for some reason or another it is no longer possible, and that all that can be done is to provide ‘readings’ of the great thinkers of the past. As the late Burton Dreben is supposed to have remarked: ‘junk is junk, but the history of junk is scholarship’. (shrink)