In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind Mind is the aspect of intellect and consciousness experienced as combinations of thought, perception, memory, emotion, will and imagination, including all unconscious cognitive processes. The term is often used to refer, by implication, to the thought processes of reason. Mind manifests itself subjectively as a stream of consciousness when one thinks Thoughts are forms conceived in the mind, rather than the forms perceived through the five senses. Thought and thinking are the processes by which these concepts are perceived and manipulated. Thinking allows beings to model the world and to represent it according to their objectives, plans, ends and desires. Similar concepts and processes include. Very often, ideas are construed as representational Representation is a term used in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to refer to a hypothetical internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality. David Marr defines representation as "a formal system for making explicit certain entities or types of information, together with a specification of how the system images; i.e. images of some object Object is a technical term used in epistemology, a branch of philosophy concerning itself with the study of knowing. Aristotle had said, "All men by nature desire to know." René Descartes expanded this knowing into the grounds of certainty with cogito ergo sum, typically translated as "I think therefore I am." The thinker. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts A concept is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology[citation needed] such as a single meaning of a term, although abstract Abstraction is a conceptual process by which higher, more abstract concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal, "real," or "concrete" concepts concepts do not necessarily appear as images.^[1] Many philosophers Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the consider ideas to be a fundamental ontological Ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Traditionally listed as a part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, category of being In metaphysics , the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply categories. To investigate the categories of being is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities. A distinction between such categories, in making the categories or applying them, is called an ontological distinction.

The capacity to create Creativity is the ability to generate innovative ideas and manifest them from thought into reality. The process involves original thinking and then producing and understand Understanding is a psychological process related to an abstract or physical object, such as a person, situation, or message whereby one is able to think about it and use concepts to deal adequately with that object the meaning of ideas is considered to be an essential and defining feature of human beings Humans are a species of animal known taxonomically as Homo sapiens , and are the only extant member of the Homo genus of bipedal primates in Hominidae, the great ape family. However, in some cases "human" is used to refer to any member of the genus Homo.

In a popular sense, an idea arises in a reflex, spontaneous manner, even without thinking or serious reflection Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious mental and usually purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul. It can also be called contemplation of one's self, and is contrasted, for example, when we talk about the idea of a person or a place.

Innate and adventitious ideas

One view on the nature of ideas is that there exist some ideas (called innate ideas) which are so general and abstract, that they could not have arisen as a representation of any object of our perception In philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science, perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information. The word "perception" comes from the Latin words perceptio, percipio, and means "receiving, collecting, action of taking possession, apprehension with the mind or senses.", but rather were, in some sense, always in the mind before we could learn them. These are distinguished from adventitious ideas which are images or concepts which are accompanied by the judgment that they are caused by some object outside of the mind.^[2]

Another view holds that we only discover ideas in the same way that we discover the real world, from personal experiences. The view that humans acquire all or almost all their behavioral traits from nurture "Nature versus nurture" is a term coined by the English Victorian polymath Francis Galton regarding the influence of heredity and environment on social careers. Galton was influenced by the book The Origin of Species written by his cousin, Charles Darwin. The concept embodied in the phrase has been criticized for its binary (life experiences) is known as tabula rasa Tabula rasa is the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception ("blank slate"). Most of the confusions in the way of ideas arise at least in part from the use of the term "idea" to cover both the representation percept and the object of conceptual thought. This can be illustrated in terms of the doctrines of innate ideas Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses, "concrete ideas An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a type of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete. Abstract objects are sometimes called abstracta (sing. abstractum) and concrete objects are sometimes called concreta (sing versus abstract ideas Abstraction is a conceptual process by which higher, more abstract concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal, "real," or "concrete" concepts", as well as "simple ideas versus complex ideas".^[3]

Philosophy

Plato

Plato Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. Plato was originally a was one of the earliest philosophers to provide a detailed discussion of ideas. He considered the concept of idea Plato's theory of Forms or theory of Ideas asserts that non-material abstract forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality. When used in this sense, the word form is often capitalized. Plato says that these Forms are the only true objects of study in the realm of metaphysics Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that is not easily defined. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world. Someone who studies metaphysics would be called either a metaphysicist or a metaphysician and its implications for epistemology Platonic epistemology holds that knowledge is innate, so that learning is the development of ideas buried deep in the soul, often under the midwife-like guidance of an interrogator. Plato believed that each soul existed before birth with "The Form of the Good" and a perfect knowledge of everything. Thus, when something is "learned&. He asserted that there is a realm of Forms or Ideas, which exist independently of anyone who may have thought of these ideas. Material things are then imperfect and transient reflections or instantiations of the perfect and unchanging ideas. From this it follows that these Ideas are the principal reality Reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or may be thought to be. In its widest definition, reality includes everything that is and has being, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible (see also idealism Idealism is the philosophical theory which maintains that the ultimate nature of reality is based on the mind or ideas. In the philosophy of perception, idealism is contrasted with realism in which the external world is said to have an apparent absolute existence. Epistemological idealists claim that the only things which can be directly known for). In contrast to the individual objects of sense experience, which undergo constant change and flux, Plato held that ideas are perfect, eternal, and immutable. Consequently, Plato considered that knowledge of material things is not really knowledge; real knowledge can only be had of unchanging ideas.

René Descartes

Descartes René Descartes (Latinized form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian"), was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, often wrote of the meaning of idea as an image or representation, often but not necessarily "in the mind", which was well known in the vernacular A vernacular, mother tongue or mother language, and less frequently one sense of idiom and dialect, is the native language of a population located in a country or in a region defined on some other basis, such as a locality. For example, Navajo is a local language in the southwest of the United States, and English is the state language of a number. In spite of the fact that Descartes is usually credited with the invention of the non-Platonic use of the term, we find him at first following this vernacular use.^b In his Meditations on First Philosophy Meditations on First Philosophy is a philosophical treatise written by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation was made by the Duke of Luynes with the supervision of Descartes and was published in 1647 with the title Méditations Metaphysiques. The original Latin title is Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua he says, "Some of my thoughts are like images of things, and it is to these alone that the name 'idea' properly belongs." He sometimes maintained that ideas were innate Innatism is a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a 'blank slate' at birth, as early empiricists such as John Locke claimed. It asserts therefore that not all knowledge is obtained from experience and the senses^[4] and uses of the term idea diverge from the original primary scholastic use. He provides multiple non-equivalent definitions of the term, uses it to refer to as many as six distinct kinds of entities, and divides ideas inconsistently into various genetic categories. [1] For him knowledge took the form of ideas and philosophical investigation is the deep consideration of these ideas. Many times however his thoughts of knowledge and ideas were like those of Plotinus Plotinus (ca. CE 204/5–270) was a major philosopher of the ancient world who is widely considered the founder of Neoplatonism (along with his teacher Ammonius Saccas). Neoplatonism was an influential philosophy in Late Antiquity. Much of our biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads and the Neoplatonists Neoplatonism is the modern term for a school of religious and mystical philosophy that took shape in the 3rd century AD, founded by Plotinus and based on the teachings of Plato and earlier Platonists. The term - neuplatonisch - was first coined by a German historian (not by Thomas Taylor who would have been dismissive of the implication that the. In Neoplatonism, the Intelligence (Nous Nous is a philosophical term for mind or intellect. Outside of a philosophical context, it is used, in English, to denote "common sense," with a different pronunciation (/naʊs/)) is the true first principle—the determinate, referential "foundation" (arkhe)—of all existents; for it is not a self-sufficient entity like the One, but rather possesses the ability or capacity to contemplate both the One, as its prior, as well as its own thoughts, which Plotinus identifies with the Platonic Ideas or Forms (eide)[2]. A non-philosophical definition of Nous is good sense (a.k.a. "common sense"). Descartes is quoted as saying, "Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed: everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect never desire more of it than they already have."q:René Descartes

John Locke

In striking contrast to Plato's use of idea^[5] is that of John Locke John Locke , widely known as the Father of Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered the first of the British empiricists, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political. In his Introduction to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is one of John Locke's two most famous works, the other being his Second Treatise on Civil Government. First appearing in 1690, the essay concerns the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate filled later through experience. The essay was one of the, Locke defines idea as "It being that term which, I think, serves best to stand for whatsoever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by phantasm, notion, species, or whatever it is which the mind can be employed about in thinking; and I could not avoid frequently using it." He said he regarded the book necessary to examine our own abilities and see what objects our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with. In his philosophy other outstanding figures followed in his footsteps—Hume and Kant in the 18th century, Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the fundamental question of whether reason alone can unlock answers about the world in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, atheist, socialist, pacifist, and social critic. Although he spent most of his life in England, he was born in Wales where he also died, aged 97, Ludwig Wittgenstein Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in the areas of logic, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, and Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH, FRS, FBA was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy in the 20th century. Locke always believed in good sense—not pushing things to extremes and on taking fully into account the plain facts of the matter. He considered his common sense ideas "good-tempered, moderate, and down-to-earth."^c

David Hume

Hume David Hume was a Scottish philosopher and historian, regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist differs from Locke by limiting idea to the more or less vague mental reconstructions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an "impression."^[6] Hume shared with Locke the basic empiricist premise that it is only from life experiences (whether their own or others') that humans' knowledge of the existence of anything outside of themselves can be ultimately derived, that they shall carry on doing what they are prompted to do by their emotional drives of varying kinds. In choosing the means to those ends, they shall follow their accustomed associations of ideas.^d Hume has contended and defended the notion that "reason alone is merely the 'slave of the passions'."^[7][8]

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Königsberg. Kant was the last influential philosopher of modern Europe in the classic sequence of the theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment beginning with thinkers John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume defines an idea as opposed to a concept A concept is a cognitive unit of meaning—an abstract idea or a mental symbol sometimes defined as a "unit of knowledge," built from other units which act as a concept's characteristics. A concept is typically associated with a corresponding representation in a language or symbology[citation needed] such as a single meaning of a term. "Regulator ideas" are ideals that one must tend towards, but by definition may not be completely realized. Liberty Liberty is the concept of ideological and political philosophy that identifies the condition to which an individual has the right to behave according to one's own personal responsibility and free will, according to Kant, is an idea. The autonomy of the rational and universal In philosophy, universalism is a doctrine or school claiming universal facts can be discovered and is therefore understood as being in opposition to relativism. In certain religions, Universality is the quality ascribed to an entity whose existence is consistent throughout the universe. When used in the context of ethics, the meaning of universal subject In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed. This concept is especially important in continental philosophy, where 'the Subject' is a central term in debates over human autonomy and the nature of the is opposed to the determinism Determinism is the philosophical view that every event, including human cognition, behaviour, decision, and action, is causally determined by previous events. Determinism proposes there is a predetermined unbroken chain of prior occurrences back to the origin of the universe of the empirical The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment. A central concept in science and the scientific method is that all evidence must be empirical, or empirically based, that is, dependent on evidence or consequences that are observable by the senses. It is usually differentiated from the philosophic subject.^[9] Kant felt that it is precisely in knowing its limits that philosophy exists. The business of philosophy he thought was not to give rules, but to analyze the private judgements of good common sense.^e

Rudolf Steiner

Whereas Kant declares limits to knowledge ("we can never know the thing in itself"), in his epistemological Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions: work, Rudolf Steiner sees ideas as "objects of experience" which the mind apprehends, much as the eye apprehends light. In Goethean Science (1883), he declares, "Thinking ... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas." He holds this to be the premise upon which Goethe made his natural-scientific observations.

Wilhelm Wundt

Wundt widens the term from Kant's usage to include conscious representation of some object or process of the external world. In so doing, he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups. One of Wundt's main concerns was to investigate conscious processes in their own context by experiment and introspection. He regarded both of these as exact methods, interrelated in that experimentation created optimal conditions for introspection. Where the experimental method failed, he turned to other objectively valuable aids, specifically to those products of cultural communal life which lead one to infer particular mental motives. Outstanding among these are speech, myth, and social custom. Wundt designed the basic mental activity apperception—a unifying function which should be understood as an activity of the will. Many aspects of his empirical physiological psychology are used today. One is his principles of mutually enhanced contrasts and of assimilation and dissimilation (i.e. in color and form perception and his advocacy of objective methods of expression and of recording results, especially in language. Another is the principle of heterogony of ends—that multiply motivated acts lead to unintended side effects which in turn become motives for new actions.^[10]

Charles Sanders Peirce

C.S. Peirce published the first full statement of pragmatism in his important works "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" (1878) and "The Fixation of Belief" (1877).^[11] In "How to Make Our Ideas Clear" he proposed that a clear idea (in his study he uses concept and idea as synonymic) is defined as one, when it is apprehended such as it will be recognized wherever it is met, and no other will be mistaken for it. If it fails of this clearness, it is said to be obscure. He argued that to understand an idea clearly we should ask ourselves what difference its application would make to our evaluation of a proposed solution to the problem at hand. Pragmatism (a term he appropriated for use in this context), he defended, was a method for ascertaining the meaning of terms (as a theory of meaning). The originality of his ideas is in their rejection of what was accepted as a view and understanding of knowledge by scientists for some 250 years, i.e. that, he pointed, knowledge was an impersonal fact. Peirce contended that we acquire knowledge as participants, not as spectators. He felt "the real" is which, sooner or later, information acquired through ideas and knowledge with the application of logical reasoning would finally result in. He also published many papers on logic in relation to ideas.

G.F. Stout and J.M. Baldwin

G.F. Stout and J.M. Baldwin, in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology [3], define idea as "the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses." They point out that an idea and a perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. "Difference in degree of intensity", "comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject", "comparative dependence on mental activity", are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception.

It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say "This is a chair, that is a stool", he has what is known as an "abstract idea" distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (see abstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.

In anthropology and the social sciences

Diffusion studies explore the spread of ideas from culture to culture. Some anthropological theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or a few original cultures, the Adam of the Bible or several cultural circles that overlap. Evolutionary diffusion theory holds that cultures are influenced by one another, but that similar ideas can be developed in isolation.

In mid-20th century, social scientists began to study how and why ideas spread from one person or culture to another. Everett Rogers pioneered diffusion of innovations studies, using research to prove factors in adoption and profiles of adopters of ideas. In 1976, in his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggested applying biological evolutionary theories to the spread of ideas. He coined the term meme to describe an abstract unit of selection, equivalent to the gene in evolutionary biology.

Semantics

Dr. Samuel Johnson

James Boswell recorded Dr.Samuel Johnson's opinion about ideas. Johnson claimed that they are mental images or internal visual pictures. As such, they have no relation to words or the concepts which are designated by verbal names.

He was particularly indignant against the almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only signify something of which an image can be formed in the mind. We may have an idea or image of a mountain, a tree, a building; but we cannot surely have an idea or image of an argument or proposition. Yet we hear the sages of the law 'delivering their ideas upon the question under consideration;' and the first speakers in parliament 'entirely coinciding in the idea which has been ably stated by an honourable member;' — or 'reprobating an idea unconstitutional, and fraught with the most dangerous consequences to a great and free country.' Johnson called this 'modern cant.'

– Boswell's Life of Johnson, Tuesday, 23 September 1777

Validity of ideas

In the objective worth of our ideas there remains the problem of the validity. As all cognition is by ideas, it is obvious that the question of the validity of our ideas in this broad sense is that of the truth of our knowledge as a whole. Otherwise to dispute this is to take up the position of skepticism. This has often been pointed out as a means of intellectual suicide. Any chain of reasoning (common sense) by which we attempt to demonstrate the falsity of our ideas has to employ the very concept of ideas itself. Then insofar as such reasoning demands assent to the conclusion, it implies belief in the validity of all the ideas employed in the premises of the argument.

To assent the fundamental mathematical and logical axioms, including that of the principle of contradiction, implies admission of the truth of the ideas expressed in these principles. With respect to the objective worth of ideas, as involved in perception generally, the question raised is that of the existence of an independent material world comprising other human beings. The idealism of David Hume and John Stuart Mill would lead logically to solipsism (the denial of any others besides ourselves). The main foundation of all idealism and skepticism is the assumption (explicit or implicit), that the mind can never know what is outside of itself. This is to say that an idea as a cognition can never go outside of itself. This can be further expressed as we can never reach to and mentally apprehend anything outside of anything of what is actually a present state of our own consciousness.

• First, this is based on a prior assumption for which no real proof is or can be given
• Second, it is not only not self-evident, but directly contrary to what our mind affirms to be our direct intellectual experience.

What is possible for a human mind to apprehend cannot be laid down beforehand. It must be ascertained by careful observations and by study of the process of cognition. This postulates that the mind cannot apprehend or cognize any reality existing outside of itself and is not only a self-evident proposition, it is directly contrary to what such observation and the testimony of mankind affirms to be our actual intellectual experience.

John Stuart Mill and most extreme idealists have to admit the validity of memory and expectation. This is to say that in every act of memory or expectation which refers to any experience outside the present instant, our cognition is transcending the present modifications of the mind and judging about reality beyond and distinct from the present states of consciousness. Considering the question as specially concerned with universal concepts, only the theory of moderate realism adopted by Aristotle and Saint Thomas can claim to guarantee objective value to our ideas. According to the nominalist and conceptualist theories there is no true correlate in rerum naturâ corresponding to the universal term.

Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the rest claim that their universal propositions are true and deal with realities. It is involved in the very notion of science that the physical laws formulated by the mind do mirror the working of agents in the external universe. The general terms of these sciences and the ideas which they signify have objective correlatives in the common natures and essences of the objects with which these sciences deal. Otherwise these general statements are unreal and each science is nothing more than a consistently arranged system of barren propositions deduced from empty arbitrary definitions. These postulates then have no more genuine objective value than any other coherently devised scheme of artificial symbols standing for imaginary beings. However the fruitfulness of science and the constant verifications of its predictions are incompatible with such a hypothesis.[4]

Relationship of ideas to modern legal time- and scope-limited monopolies

Relationship between ideas and patents

On Susceptibility to Exclusive Property

Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 August 1813

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance.

By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

To protect the cause of invention and innovation, the legal constructions of Copyrights and Patents was established. Patent law regulates various aspects related to the functional manifestation of inventions based on new ideas or incremental improvements to existing ones. Thus, patents have a direct relationship to ideas.

Relationship between ideas and copyrights

In some cases, authors can be granted limited legal monopolies on the manner in which certain works are expressed. This is known colloquially as copyright, although the term intellectual property is used mistakenly in place of copyright. Copyright law regulating the aforementioned monopolies generally does not cover the actual ideas. The law does not bestow the legal status of property upon ideas per se. Instead, laws purport to regulate events related to the usage, copying, production, sale and other forms of exploitation of the fundamental expression of a work, that may or may not carry ideas. Copyright law is fundamentally different to patent law in this respect: patents do grant monopolies on ideas (more on this below).

A copyright is meant to regulate some aspects of the usage of expressions of a work, not an idea. Thus, copyrights have a negative relationship to ideas.

Work means a tangible medium of expression. It may be an original or derivative work of art, be it literary, dramatic, musical recitation, artistic, related to sound recording, etc. In (at least) countries adhering to the Berne Convention, copyright automatically starts covering the work upon the original creation and fixation thereof, without any extra steps. While creation usually involves an idea, the idea in itself does not suffice for the purposes of claiming copyright.

Relationship of ideas to confidentiality agreements

Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements are legal instruments that assist corporations and individuals in keeping ideas from escaping to the general public. Generally, these instruments are covered by contract law.

See also

• Form
• Meme
• Opinion
• Ideology
• Think tank
• Mental image
• Brainstorming
• Portal: thinking
• Object of the mind
• Perception related
• Notion (philosophy)
• Thought experiment
• Creativity techniques
• Diffusion of innovations
• Universal (metaphysics)
• Introspection and Extrospection
• Mind map
• Freemind
• Global Ideas Bank
• Opencourseware
• TED (conference)

Bibliography

• Paul Natorp, Platons Ideenlehre (Leipzig 1930)
• W.D. Ross, Plato's Theory of Ideas (Oxford 1951)
• M.H. Carre, Realists and Nominalists (Oxford 1946)
• Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York 2001)
• J.W. Yolton, John Lock and the Way of Ideas (Oxford 1956)
• Eugenio Garin, La Theorie de I'idee suivant I'ecole thomiste (Paris 1932)
• Peter Watson, Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (London 2005).
• A.G. Balz, Idea and Essence in the Philosophy of Hobbes and Spinoza (New York 1918)
• William Rose Benet, The Reader's Encyclopedia 1965, Library of Congress Card No. 65-12510
• Melchert, Norman (2002). The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. McGraw Hill. ISBN 0-19-517510-7.

Notes

1. ^ Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
2. ^ Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
3. ^ The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacMillian Publishing Company, New York, 1973 ISBN 0-02-894950-1 ISBN 978-0-02-894950-5 Vol 4: 120–121
4. ^ Vol 4: 196–198
5. ^ Vol 4: 487–503
6. ^ Vol 4: 74–90
7. ^ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-moral/#inmo
8. ^ Hume, David: A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. (1739–40)
9. ^ Vol 4: 305–324
10. ^ Vol 8: 349–351
11. ^ Pierce's pragmatism

References

• The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacMillian Publishing Company, New York, 1973 ISBN 0-02-894950-1 ISBN 978-0-02-894950-5
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1973-74, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-7943 ISBN 684-16425-6

- Nous

¹ Volume IV 1a, 3a

² Volume IV 4a, 5a

³ Volume IV 32 - 37

- Ideas

Idealogy

Authority

Education

Liberalism

Idea of God

Pragmatism

Chain of Being

• The Story of Thought, DK Publishing, Bryan Magee, London, 1998, ISBN 0-7894-4455-0

aka The Story of Philosophy, Dorling Kindersley Publishing, 2001, ISBN 0-7894-7994-X

(subtitled on cover: The Essential Guide to the History of Western Philosophy)

^a Plato, pages 11 - 17, 24 - 31, 42, 50, 59, 77, 142, 144, 150

^b Descartes, pages 78, 84 - 89, 91, 95, 102, 136 - 137, 190, 191

^c Locke, pages 59 - 61, 102 - 109, 122 - 124, 142, 185

^d Hume, pages 61, 103, 112 - 117, 142 - 143, 155, 185

^e Kant, pages 9, 38, 57, 87, 103, 119, 131 - 137, 149, 182

^f Pierce, pages 61, How to Make Our Ideas Clear 186 - 187 and 189

^g Saint Augustine, pages 30, 144; City of God 51, 52, 53 and The Confessions 50, 51, 52

- additional in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas for Saint Augustine and Neo-Platonism

^h Stoics, pages 22, 40, 44; The governing philosophy of the Roman Empire on pages 46 - 47.

- additional in Dictionary of the History of Ideas for Stoics, also here, and here, and here.

• The Reader's Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition 1965, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Library of Congress No. 65-12510

An Encyclopedia of World Literature

^¹apage 774 Plato (c.427-348 BC)

^²apage 779 Francesco Petrarca

^³apage 770 Charles Sanders Peirce

^¹bpage 849 the Renaissance

• This article incorporates text from the old Catholic Encyclopedia of 1914, a publication now in the public domain.
• This article incorporates text from the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, a publication now in the public domain.
• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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