hypostatize
Americanverb (used with object)
verb
-
to regard or treat as real
-
to embody or personify
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:
If we apply it also to qualities of things, we hypostatize the abstract quality.
From A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy by Husik, Isaac
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 Park, Robert Ezra
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 Howard, Delton Thomas
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
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 Bode, Boyd H.
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 Kohler, Kaufmann
Indeed a pyrrhonist might raise the objection that if "esse" is "percipi" spirit itself can have no existence except as a perception, hypostatized into a "self," or as a perception of some other spirit.
From Evolution and Ethics by Huxley, Thomas Henry
The Ideas are nothing but hypostatized things of sense, and Aristotle likens them to the anthropomorphic gods of the popular religion.
From A Critical History of Greek Philosophy by Stace, W. T. (Walter Terence)
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 Meiklejohn, John Miller Dow
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 Jones, Jesse H.
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 Meiklejohn, John Miller Dow
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 Meiklejohn, John Miller Dow
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
