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[ Begriff ] see also category , epistemology , imagination , metaphysics , representation , synthesis , understanding , unity The German word for concept – Begriff – translates the past participle of the Latin verb concipere : ‘to take to oneself, to take and hold’. As a substantive it does not appear in the philosophical vocabulary before the late seventeenth century; prior to this it meant a ‘provisional sketch’ of a legal document or agreement, or even a poetic conceit. It was first used in a logical and epistemological context by Leibniz, most probably in his influential Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (1784; see Leibniz, 1976, pp. 291–5). This names the product of conception as the ‘concept’, a deliberate neologism directed against the Cartesian reliance on terms such as ‘idea’ and ‘notion’ (although Leibniz also uses these). The neologism was accepted by Wolff in his Logic and through this became part of the German philosophical language. Meissner's Philosophisches Lexicon (1737) gives notio and idea as synonyms of Begriff , but they are clearly in the process of being distinguished from each other. Concepts are broadly defined by Leibniz and his followers as ‘any representation of a thing’ and are classified according to their degrees of clarity, distinctness, completion and adequacy. This is the context in which Kant began to use the term ... log in or subscribe to read full text