noumenon
IPA: nˈumʌnɑn
noun
- (from Kantian philosophy on) A thing as it is independent of any conceptualization or perception by the human mind, postulated by practical reason but existing in a condition which is in principle unknowable and unexperienceable.
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Examples of "noumenon" in Sentences
- Behind the phenomena of human history, the noumenon is the Human
- The substrate or 'causa invisibilis' may be the 'noumenon' or actuality,
- Pure action, that is, the will, is a 'noumenon', and irreferable to time.
- What, therefore, we call noumenon must be understood by us as such in a negative sense.
- Now the 'phænomenon' is in time, and an effect: but the 'noumenon' is not in time any more than it is in space.
- The noumenon is a bit difficult to locate; it can be apprehended only be a process of reasoning -- which is a phenomenon.
- If, by the term noumenon, we understand a thing so far as it is not an object of our sensuous intuition, thus making abstraction of our mode of intuiting it, this is a noumenon in the negative sense of the word.
- Surely not the visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders; but his supersensual body, the 'noumenon' of his human nature which was united to his divine nature.
- And we cannot call a noumenon an object of pure thought; for the representation thereof is but the problematical conception of an object for a perfectly different intuition and a perfectly different understanding from ours, both of which are consequently themselves problematical.
- Some hold that the universal nature of things of any kind is an Idea existing (apart from the things) in the intelligible world, invisible to mortal eye and only accessible to thought; whence the Idea is called a noumenon: that only the Idea is truly real, and that the things (say, trees, bedsteads and cities) which appear to us in sense-perception, and which therefore are called phenomena, only exist by participating in, or imitating, the Idea of each kind of them.
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