conceptualism
nounEtymology From conceptual + -ism.
1
The art movement towards conceptual art.
2
Human sciences, Philosophy, Sciences A theory, intermediate between realism and nominalism, that the mind has the power of forming for itself general conceptions of individual or single objects; the doctrine that universals have an existence in the mind apart from any concrete embodiment.
- We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself[…]1853, Victor Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good:
- Derived terms
- anticonceptualism, neoconceptualism, nonconceptualism, photoconceptualism, postconceptualism