Literary notes about Conceptual (AI summary)
Across literary works, “conceptual” is deployed to designate an abstract, organizing principle that frames how characters or ideas are understood. It often marks the terrain where sensory experience gives way to rational, meta-level thought—as when sensory content is shaped by abstract forms [1] or when moral and legal reasoning is seen as a process of placing facts into distinct conceptual boxes [2]. In other contexts, “conceptual” underlines a process of intellectual synthesis, bridging a priori reasoning with tangible reality, thereby allowing a transition from immediate perceptions to systematic knowledge [3], [4]. Moreover, this term is sometimes employed to critique a detachment from empirical content, highlighting a tension between the idealized order of thought and concrete experience [5], [6].
- The relation of the sensuous content to the conceptual form is not dead, as in Kant's doctrine.
— from Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude by George H. Mead - Much of what lawyers do is put the same facts into different conceptual boxes.
— from The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle - But when all other grounds of determination take second place, then we rely, in the first place, on conceptual intuition itself.
— from The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity A Modern Philosophy of Life Developed by Scientific Methods by Rudolf Steiner - And it is only the smallest part of his experience's flux that anyone actually does straighten out by applying to it these conceptual instruments.
— from Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking by William James - This law was itself the result of pure observation, but was clothed in a conceptual form devoid of reality.
— from Man or Matter Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought by Ernst Lehrs - What, then, are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the conceptual translation so fatally leaves out?
— from A Pluralistic Universe Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy by William James
