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Something, such as a thought or conception that actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity that has of itself an idea, it is, to say, that without an ideas there is no possible potential for concept, and, if be to no concept there are no ideas. History is in essence a history of ideas, as thoughts are distinctly intellectual and stresses contemplation and reasoning. Justly as language is the dress of thought. Ideas began with Plato, as eternal, mind-independent forms or archetypes of the things in the material world. Neoplatonism  made them thoughts in the mind of God who created the world. The much criticized ‘new way of ideas’, so much a part of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, began with Descartes’ (1596-1650) when a conscionable extension  of ideas to cover whatever is in human minds too, an extension of which Locke (1632-1704) made much use. Yet are they like mental images, of things outside the mind, or non-representational, like sensations? If representational, are they mental objects, standing between the mind and what they represent, or are they  mental acts and modifications of a mind perceiving the world directly? Finally, are they neither objects nor mental acts, but dispositions? Malebranche (1632-1715) and Arnauld (1612-94 ), and then Leibniz (1646-1716), famously disagreed about how ‘ideas’ should be understood, and recent scholars disagree about how Arnauld, Descartes, Locke and Malebranche in fact understood them.


Although ideas give rise to many problems of interpretation, but between them they define a space of philosophical problems. Ideas are that with which we think, or in Locke’s terms, whatever the mind may be employed about in thinking. Looked at that way, they seem to be inherently transient, fleeting, and unstable private presences. Ideas provide the way in which objective knowledge can be expressed. They are the essential components of understanding, and any intelligible proposition that is true must be capable of being understood. Plato’s theory of ‘forms’ is a launching celebration of the objective and timeless existence of ideas as concepts, and reified to the point where they make up the only real world, of separate and perfect models of which the empirical world is only a poor cousin. This doctrine, notably in the ‘Timaeus’, opened the way for the Neoplatonic notion of ideas as the thoughts of God. The concept gradually lost this other-worldly aspect, until after Descartes ideas become assimilated to whatever it is that lies in the mind of any thinking being.