Editing Concept (section)

==== Realist universal concepts ====
{{Main|Platonic realism}}
[[Platonism|Platonist]] views of the mind construe concepts as abstract objects.<ref name="concepts core readings">{{cite book|title=Concepts and Cognitive Science|author=Stephen Lawrence|author2=Eric Margolis|publisher=Massachusetts Institute of Technology|year=1999|isbn=978-0-262-13353-1|location=in Concepts: Core Readings|pages=3–83}}</ref> [[Plato]] was the starkest proponent of the realist thesis of universal concepts. By his view, concepts (and ideas in general) are innate ideas that were instantiations of a transcendental world of pure forms that lay behind the veil of the physical world. In this way, universals were explained as transcendent objects. Needless to say, this form of realism was tied deeply with Plato's ontological projects. This remark on Plato is not of merely historical interest. For example, the view that numbers are Platonic objects was revived by [[Kurt Gödel]] as a result of certain puzzles that he took to arise from the phenomenological accounts.<ref>'Godel's Rationalism', [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#GodRat Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]</ref>