The transcending, or going beyond, empiricism, and ascertaining a priori the fundamental principles of human knowledge.
Ambitious and imaginative vagueness in thought, imagery, or diction.
A nineteenth-century group of American writers and thinkers who believed that only by transcending the limits of rationalism and received tradition could the individual fully realize his or her potential. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau are among the most influential Transcendentalists.
Literary and philosophical movement of Emerson, Alcotts, Lane, Fuller, Thoreau, stressing nature, Eastern thought, 1830s-50s.
any system of philosophy emphasizing the intuitive and spiritual above the empirical and material
A philosophy of nature that holds that everything is an approximation to an ideal standard or type. It was popular in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and derives from Platonism and Goethe, the latter tradition known in Germany as Naturphilosophie. On this account, species are ideal types and have no variation that is not degradation of the type. Variation is seen as monstrosity. Some transcendentalists, like Owen, saw species as implementing the types differently, and from this Owen developed his idea of homology (same function from the same part of the archetype) and analogy (same function using different structures).
A philosophy derived from ROMANTICISM that flourished in the United States in the early nineteenth century. American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau championed and articulated the philosophy, which contends that the individual mind has the capability to transcend the human institutions that seek to fetter it. The transcendentalists believed that the most valuable pursuit was to experience, reflect upon, and study nature and its relation to the individual.
1. The philosophical disposition to look for truth within oneself, as against the conventions of culture or society. 2. A form of realist metaphysical thought, esp. in Plato, which sees Truth beyond the phenomenal, material world. 3. A part of Kantian philosophy in which real knowledge is achievable when one can transcend mere empiricism and ascertain the a priori. 4. A New England movement, associated most often with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that sought to express spiritual reality and the ideal, relying exclusively on intuition.
A broad, philosophical movement in New England during the Romantic era (peaking between 1835 and 1845). It stressed the role of divinity in nature and the individual s intuition, and exalted feeling over reason.
A literary and philosophical movement that asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition
Transcendentalism was the fullest expression of early nineteenth-century romanticism. It was a mystical, intuitive way of looking at life that subordinated facts to feelings. Transcendentalists argued that humans could transcend reason and intellectual capacities by having faith in themselves and in the fundamental benevolence of the universe. They were complete individualists.
Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early-to mid-19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.