conceptualism

Etymology

conceptual + -ism

noun

1. The art movement towards conceptual art.
2. (philosophy) A theory, intermediate between realism and nominalism, that the mind has the power of forming for itself general conceptions of individual or single objects; the doctrine that universals have an existence in the mind apart from any concrete embodiment.
   We have thus returned, then, to that conceptualism of the middle age, which, concentrating truth within the human intelligence, makes the nature of things a phantom of intelligence projecting itself everywhere out of itself[…] 1853, Victor Cousin, Lectures on the True, the Beautiful, and the Good