In the system of transcendental philosophy that Kant presents in Critique of pure reason, a 'concept' is a representation of many things at once, through common features. It is contrasted with an intuition, which gives an individual. Kant's German term is "Begriff", literally a seizing or gripping; this is the translation of the Latin technical term "conceptus", which literally means "taking together", in other words gathering up the universal properties of a thing in an act of the mind.

A concept is something we create in order to compare many phenomena to one another, or to distinguish them according to their different properties. In classical philosophy, that means that a concept is an act of the intellect, which is just the technical term for our power to understand things beyond merely sensing them. Concepts are discursive - that is, they do not give direct data of the things they represent, but rather they elaborate or comment upon the data given in intuition. Concepts let us make judgments and draw inferences.

Concepts let us turn the manifold of intuition into a world that we can know about and act within. It is through concepts that we can move beyond merely how the world appears, and aspire to represent the world as it is; but we are responsible for our own interpretation of the world, at every level of judgment.

BreQ07