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disinterestedness

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The character of being disinterested or unselfish; the fact of having no personal interest in a question or an event; freedom from bias or prejudice on account of private interest; unselfishness; generosity.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The state or quality of being disinterested; impartiality.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The state or quality of being disinterested.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun freedom from bias or from selfish motives

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From disinterested +‎ -ness.

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Examples

  • Suppose that they had seriously endeavored, and had succeeded in the endeavor, to banish the word disinterestedness from the language; had obtained the disuse of all expressions attaching odium to selfishness or commendation to self-sacrifice, or which implied generosity or kindness to be any thing but doing a benefit in order to receive a greater personal advantage in return.

    A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive John Stuart Mill 1839

  • Can this be double-distilled treachery? — or can it be what men call disinterestedness? —

    Count Robert of Paris 2008

  • Many of the main themes, such as the concept of the sublime, the notion of disinterestedness, and the theoretical centrality of nature rather than art, culminated with Kant, who gave some of these ideas such exhaustive treatment that a kind of philosophical closure was seemingly achieved.

    Environmental Aesthetics Carlson, Allen 2008

  • The whole side of life of which art is the flower requires something which may be called disinterestedness, a capacity for direct enjoyment without thought of tomorrow's problems and difficulties.

    Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism 1914

  • Many outsiders conclude from this teaching that the conception of the world as something unreal lies at the root of the so-called disinterestedness preached in India.

    Sadhana : the realisation of life Rabindranath Tagore 1901

  • Judgment requires, above all, what Kant called disinterestedness and what Arendt called enlarged mentality, seeing the question from another's point of view.

    Democracy Journal Roger Berkowitz 2010

  • Hence the birth of the celebrated criterion of "disinterestedness" for aesthetic enjoyment. 2

    Tastes and Pleasures 2007

  • Erudition, when it is humane, and even when it is merely academic, has, at any rate, always that disinterestedness which is essential alike to science and art.

    Personality in Literature Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

  • Its great corresponding defect -- and this is immeasurable -- is its loss in form, in universality, in that disinterestedness which is essential to art.

    Personality in Literature Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

  • In conclusion, fellow citizens, allow me to invoke in behalf of your deliberations that spirit of conciliation and disinterestedness which is the gift of patriotism.

    State of the Union Address (1790-2001) United States. Presidents.

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