thing-in-itself

American  

[thing-in-it-self] / ˌθɪŋ ɪn ɪtˈsɛlf /

noun

Kantianism.

• things-in-themselves
  plural

1. reality as it is apart from experience; what remains to be postulated after space, time, and all the categories of the understanding are assigned to consciousness.

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thing-in-itself British  

noun

1. (in the philosophy of Kant) an element of the noumenal rather than the phenomenal world, of which the senses give no knowledge but whose bare existence can be inferred from the nature of experience

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thing-in-itself Cultural  

1. A notion in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. A thing-in-itself is an object as it would appear to us if we did not have to approach it under the conditions of space and time.

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• things-in-themselves
  plural

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Etymology

Origin of thing-in-itself

1650–60; translation of German Ding an sich

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Example Sentences

See Examples For:

thing-in-itself things-in-themselves

Most often we end up smothering the plain eloquence of the thing-in-itself under a pile of metaphors.

From Scientific American ● Oct. 9, 2015

He sees his farm simply as an ideal place to watch life in its essentials and to try a thing-in-itself way of conveying this — which he considers a new kind of realism.

From New York Times ● Jul. 3, 2011

This question rests, like so many others, upon the confusion of the thing-in-itself with the manifestation.

From The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

For it is just the thing-in-itself, which, because it is manifested, exhibits these phenomena, which are entirely different from itself.

From The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

For every individual is transitory only as phenomenon, but as thing-in-itself is timeless, and therefore endless.

From The World As Will And Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer

The feelings are therefore the things-in-themselves, the ultimate substances of which consciousness and gross matter are made up.

From A History of Indian Philosophy, Volume 1 by Surendranath Dasgupta

The nature of things-in-themselves would remain an eternal secret to us, were it not that we are able to approach it, not by knowledge of external phenomena, but by inner experience.

From Nature Mysticism by John Edward Mercer

They seem to be in a realm of things-in-themselves.

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

In any case it was a work of great merit to have transferred the existence of objects beyond our ideas, of things-in-themselves, out of the region of the self-evident into the region of the problematical.

From History of Modern Philosophy From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time by Richard Falckenberg

This outside world is constructed by him from the contents of the inside sounds, which differ as widely from things-in-themselves as language, the symbol, must always differ from the thing it symbolizes.

From An Introduction to Philosophy by George Stuart Fullerton

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