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transcendentalism - 4 dictionary results

tran⋅scen⋅den⋅tal⋅ism

  [tran-sen-den-tl-iz-uhm, -suhn-]
Use transcendentalism in a Sentence
–noun
1. transcendental character, thought, or language.
2. Also called transcendental philosophy. any philosophy based upon the doctrine that the principles of reality are to be discovered by the study of the processes of thought, or a philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical: in the U.S., associated with Emerson.
Origin:
1795–1805; < G Transcendentalismus. See transcendental, -ism

Related forms:
tran⋅scen⋅den⋅tal⋅ist, noun, adjective
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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tran·scen·den·tal·ism   (trān'sěn-děn'tl-ĭz'əm)   
n.  
  1. A literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition.
  2. The quality or state of being transcendental.
tran'scen·den'tal·ist n.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Transcendentalism

Tran`scen*den"tal*ism\, n. [Cf. F. transcendantalisme, G. transcendentalismus.]

1. (Kantian Philos.) The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.

Note: As Schelling and Hegel claim to have discovered the absolute identity of the objective and subjective in human knowledge, or of things and human conceptions of them, the Kantian distinction between transcendent and transcendental ideas can have no place in their philosophy; and hence, with them, transcendentalism claims to have a true knowledge of all things, material and immaterial, human and divine, so far as the mind is capable of knowing them. And in this sense the word transcendentalism is now most used. It is also sometimes used for that which is vague and illusive in philosophy.

2. Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
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transcendentalism

A movement in nineteenth-century American literature and thought. It called on people to view the objects in the world as small versions of the whole universe and to trust their individual intuitions. The two most noted American transcendentalists were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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