The understanding is the intellectual psychic faculty which makes it possible to seize the problems and the situations.

The concept of understanding in philosophy

In the Critical of the pure reason , Emmanuel Kant defines the understanding ( Verstand ) as faculty to create Concept S. It is thus an active faculty. The Understanding will allow the synthesis of various, i.e. the unification of the data of the sensory intuition by ordering them through the categories. The Categories, twelve, are the most general ideas which one can think (unit, plurality, causality…). It is thanks to these categories, these concepts of the understanding, which we can, according to Kant, to unify the various ones. The knowledge of an object is done by the connection of the sensory intuitions and the concepts of the understanding. The Critique of the pure reason has as a task to assign limits with the use of the concepts of the understanding, to limit the field of knowledge of it to the only phenomena. Even if by its structure catégoriel the understanding projects its concepts beyond the phenomena, it is only to let foresee that it does not seize the Chose in oneself because it is necessary for him imperatively to be based on synthetic judgments which call upon the sensory intuitions to design its object like existing. The understanding being unification of various under concepts must have access to this various by the means of an intuition which at the man can be only sensitive. Without intuition the understanding cannot seize any object positively, but the negative determination that the understanding of a nonsensitive object can give (Noumène) does not bring any knowledge. I do not know anything an object of which I can only say that it has neither time neither space nor causes,…

The concept of understanding is also found in the middle of famous the " treaty of the caractères" of Liu Shao, a high administrator of the Chinese empire having lived at the end of the dynasty Han (3rd century).

It is in particular known as in this work: " What one admires more in the saints and the wise ones, it is the understanding. What there is more invaluable in the implementation of the understanding, it is the knowledge of the men. If the knowledge of the men is truly a science, the various talents will find each one their row, and all kinds of companies méritoires développeront."

Bonds

• Treated reform of the understanding , Spinoza

• New Tests on the human understanding , Critical Leibniz
• of the pure reason , Kant