Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In metaphysics, a quiddity.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun philosophy
Essence ;quiddity . - noun
Quality ;quantity .
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The sense of "something there" accompanies our sense perceptions, vouching for the "whatness" of things.
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Rather than arguing that things convey their reality to percipients which would imply that we recognize as real only those things possessed of "whatness", James argues that the sense of reality is a constituent part of the percipient's experience that may in fact be independent of the object of that experience.
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To my parents, Bernie and Kay, for showing me what “no matter whatness” really ought to look like.
Tattoos on the Heart Gregory Boyle 2010
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The “no matter whatness” of God dissolves the toxicity of shame and fills us with tender mercy.
Tattoos on the Heart Gregory Boyle 2010
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To this end, one hopes against all human inclination to model not the “one false move” God but the “no matter whatness” of God.
Tattoos on the Heart Gregory Boyle 2010
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You never stop asking, and sometimes the “no matter whatness” prevails.
Tattoos on the Heart Gregory Boyle 2010
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He nodded so I continued, in this ugly new voice, to ask him about the skin and bones and the whatness of this place and if I'd opened the door to hell and he said, finally, this wasn't hell.
Magic X Nina Alvarez 2010
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And yet we decided, with all the “no matter whatness” we could muster, that she would give up on us long before we would ever give up on her.
Tattoos on the Heart Gregory Boyle 2010
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The later Heidegger clarifies that the thinking that begins with Being and Time is neither directed to being in a metaphysical sense the whatness or thatness of things nor directed to the human being in an existential-phenomenological sense.
enowning enowning 2008
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Medieval metaphysics in particular Thomas Aquinas focused on the whatness or quidditas as the subject of ontology, but this is already a significant narrowing of the horizon of the original Aristotelean definition which leaves open many ways of thinking to proceed INCLUDING the possibility of not giving Whatness the priority, let alone the exclusive signification, among the various possible meanings of being.
Archive 2008-03-01 enowning 2008
smeggo commented on the word whatness
The thisness or thatness of a thing.
October 15, 2008