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Synonyms

hypostatize

American  
[hahy-pos-tuh-tahyz, hi-] / haɪˈpɒs təˌtaɪz, hɪ- /
especially British, hypostatise

verb (used with object)

hypostatized, hypostatizing
  1. to treat or regard (a concept, idea, etc.) as a distinct substance or reality.


hypostatize British  
/ haɪˈpɒstəˌtaɪz /

verb

  1. to regard or treat as real

  2. to embody or personify

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Etymology

Origin of hypostatize

First recorded in 1820–30; from Greek hypostatós, hypóstatos “set under, (in Stoic philosophy) substantially existing” ( see hypostatic) + -ize

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

See Examples For:

When we hypostatize our hopes and wishes and treat them as matters of fact, even though they cannot be proved to be either true or false, they assume a form which Sorel describes as myth.

From Introduction to the Science of Sociology by Robert Ezra Park

If we apply it also to qualities of things, we hypostatize the abstract quality.

From A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy by Isaac Husik

As Green tended to hypostatize the organic conception, so Dewey would make it a concrete reality, with the further specification that it must be something given to psychological observation.

From John Dewey's logical theory by Delton Thomas Howard

Yet if Mars is a hypostatized version of earthly nature, separate from humans, it is also something we’ve projected ourselves onto—and are already laying waste to.

From Slate Mar. 30, 2021

As the objects are hypostatized percepts, so the relations are hypostatized processes of the human understanding.

From The Sense of Beauty Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory by George Santayana

This conception of wisdom became still further hypostatized.

From Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 13, Slice 2 "Hearing" to "Helmond" by Various

The divine wisdom, creative and world-sustaining, became the highest of the divine attributes and was partially hypostatized as an independent cosmic power.

From Jewish Theology by Kaufmann Kohler

What it demands of the ghost, and of all hypostatized or anthropomorphized ultimate value-forms, is that they shall work, and its life as an institution depends upon making them work.

From Creative Intelligence Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude by Boyd H. Bode

Such an existence would be purely fictitious, and the hypostatizing of the content of the idea into an ideal, as an individual being, is a step perfectly unauthorized.

From The Critique of Pure Reason by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

This he accounts for by by hypostatizing a "raw material" in consciousness which is, must be, present.

From Know the Truth; A critique of the Hamiltonian Theory of Limitation by Jesse H. Jones

We cannot, at the same time, avoid regarding, by a transcendental subreptio, this formal principle as constitutive, and hypostatizing this unity.

From The Critique of Pure Reason by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

We begin by hypostatizing the principle of systematic unity, and by giving an anthropomorphic determination to the conception of a Supreme Intelligence, and then proceed forcibly to impose aims upon nature.

From The Critique of Pure Reason by John Miller Dow Meiklejohn

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