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prehension. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
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prehension in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
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English
Etymology
Borrowed from Latin prehensio, prehensionis. Doublet of prison.
Pronunciation
Noun
prehension (countable and uncountable, plural prehensions)
- The act of grasping or gripping, especially with the hands.
- (philosophy) According to Alfred North Whitehead, a type of universally acting perception that is not limited to living, self-conscious beings, and which involves an interconnectedness of the observer and the observed.
1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 214:The addiction to punning was related to a reverence for the "Word." In a pun or a hieroglyphic figure, several lines come together in what Whitehead would call "a prehension"; in the comprehension of an event, that sympathetic resonance between the observor and the "thing" observed, there is a correspondence between the cosmic word of the gods (the Logos of St. John) and the inner words of the human mind, for each shares existence because it is a manifestation of divine laws and harmony.